Bedevilled by planning problems and other delays, the National Gallery of Ireland's new Millennium Wing has been well worth waiting for. Breathtaking, visionary and sophisticated - the Millenium Wing of the National Gallery, is a cultural and architectural monument that is well worth the wait, writes Frank McDonald
Bedevilled by planning problems and other delays, the National Gallery of Ireland's new Millennium Wing has been well worth waiting for. Because what it does is to transform a conventional art gallery into an exciting place for the public to view paintings or even just to enjoy a cup of coffee or a browse in the bookshop.
For the first time in its history, the gallery now has a real presence on the street. But few passers-by could imagine the truly breathtaking interior that lies behind its somewhat squashed Portland stone, glass and timber façade and the adjoining mid 18th-century building, which the gallery's board was required to retain.
Though it is a double-height cube, the vestibule gives just a glimpse of what follows. Only when one passes beneath the steel canopy over its inner door is the vast volume of the wing's "orientation court", rising right up to roof level, revealed with sensational effect. If there is anywhere in Dublin with a "wow factor", this is it.
The unpainted plaster walls slashed with slits and other apertures, the steel-beamed bridge crossing it at a high level, the grand staircase at the opposite end and the wide openings to the glazed "Winter Garden" all combine to inspire awe and wonder. Ireland has never seen such a dramatic or dynamic space for art.
Compared with the small rooms and long corridors of IMMA, so wrong-headedly located in the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, the Millennium Wing's classically dispositioned galleries are tall and expansive; their unpainted plaster walls should be left as exactly they are, whatever the curators say about creating different "moods".
But the galleries take up only a proportion of the new wing. Space has been reserved on an upper mezzanine level for the nascent Centre for the Study of Irish Art and the Yeats Archive, and the gallery's other facilities include a large bookshop in black and blond wood, a small audio-visual room, a snack bar and a restaurant.
The restaurant occupies the glazed Winter Garden, overlooked by the bow-fronted windows of No. 5 South Leinster Street.
Unfortunately, its rear wall was in such "rag order", according to Raymond Keaveney, the gallery's director, that it had to be consolidated and plastered over, instead of having the brickwork properly restored.
At the other end is one of the most curious sights in Dublin - a brick-fronted Regency ballroom, which is to become a private dining area. Though fitted out in white ash to look thoroughly modern, it is a bizarre, almost archaeological remnant, made even more so by the bridge that crosses diagonally over its slated roof.
The retention of No. 5 and its ballroom, as required by An Bord Pleanála, means that the wing as completed is quite different to what London-based architects Benson and Forsyth originally planned. But whether their bold vision has been compromised - as its planning inspector, Padraig Thornton, feared - is a moot point.
Certainly, the roof terrace is more ordinary and can't at present be opened to the public because of lack of disabled access, which is a shame because of the views it offers over the city; this will only be resolved when a "finger building" is built on the staff car-park site off Clare Lane and plugged into the Millennium Wing.
One of Benson and Forsyth's great triumphs is the clarity of circulation within the building, which gives visitors numerous opportunities to "look back at where they've been", as project architect Jim Hutcheson puts it, and to peer out through openings of all shapes and sizes to confirm their mental maps of the city centre.
Its geometry also offers radically different perspectives. Thus, the orientation court appears to be much more truncated when viewed from the first-floor landing than it does from the entrance. One can also spot architectural references ranging from medieval cloisters to the wavy design motif associated with Alvar Aalto.
The architects floridly make the case that their building is firmly rooted in Dublin. What concerned them was not "fashionable formal rhetoric [but] issues of formal integrity, of context and of achieving an appropriate expression of gravitas consistent with the cultural importance of the National Gallery of Ireland".
Through it's entry sequence from Clare Street- via the main orientation court and grand staircase to the existing atrium and the
entrance hall of the original building - the new wing" physically and visually articulates the relationship between the centre of Dublin, the playing fields of Trinty College, Merrion Sqaure and Leinster Lawn".
Continuing this geo- cultural theme, Benson and Forsyth describe the Clare Street facade as "an inhabited wall" which "mediates between the new building and the city" with well-located apertures offering framed views of Trinity College, Nassau Street and the north side of
Merrion Square to "anchor the visual memory of the visitor."
The elevation "mimics the height of the existing Georgian street facades", picking up the parapet line of 5 South Leinster Street, and it's proportions are also vertically articulated to two bays, reflecting the nature of the spaces behind as well as "evoking the vertical modulation of its Georgian predecessors."
Behind this wall, the new galleries and spaces are gathered around the orientation court and the glazed Winter Garden, which in turn echoes the Georgian garden that once occupied this site and spatially mediates between the facade of No. 5, the "found object" of its retained Regency ballroom and, of course, the new building.
"In this way, the Millenium Wing seeks to give expression to a dialogue between the art objects it contains and the city within which the building itself is contained." And it does so. Benson & Forsyth maintain, by achieving " the most sensitive relationship possible with the existing structures, which it both abuts and contains."
Within the constraints laid down by An Bord Pleanala, the architects have certainly succeeded: that it now seems silly to have retained the ballroom is not their fault. Indeed, it is arguable that few, if any, Irish architects could have mastered the brief with such sophistication and vision; those invited to do so failed at the first fence.
Klaus Unger, one of the most senior architects in the Office Of Public Works, which manages the project, believes that the new building will assume the same significance in Dublin as Mies Van der Rohe's Neue Natinoalgallerie in Berlin. " It's a great uplift and shows the public that architecture really matters. ".
The result is a clear vindication of architectural competitions, even a "huge act of faith" by the National Gallery, as Raymond Keavey freely admits. Credit is due here to his former deputy, Dr Brian Kennedy, who provided the initial driving force for the project before departing for Australia some years ago.
The only scandalous aspect is that the Government put so little into it - a miserly E3.17 million, most of which it got back in VAT and PAYE receipts.
This forced the gallery to dig into its own reserves, to the tune of £4 million ( which should have been spent on aquisitions) and to raise no less than £6 million form private donors.
That European taxpayers should have contributed three times as much as our own Government, through a E9.52 million grant from the EU Regional Development Fund, is a shocking indictment of the Government and the value it assigns to such a major public project. In France, it would have been paid out of the public purse.
Perhaps the gallery will have more success in securing Exchequer funds to re-roof and up-grade its older buildings so that they won't look so dowdy compared with the new wing, to refurbish No. 5 South Leinster St. as administrative offices and to build the so-called finger building- all of which will cost a lot more than E25.39 million.
In the meantime, one can only cast a cold eye on the very long and prominently displayed "MM" foundation stone commemorating Sile De Valera, the Minister for Arts, the Gaeltacht and the Islands, who laid it. For she is a member of the same government that is not entitled to claim credit for this superb building.
The Millenium Wing opens to the public on Tuesday. The opening exhibition is Monet, Renior and the Impressionist Landscape.