Route Master - museum quarter in Utrecht, Netherlands - Brief Article

Architectural Review, The, April, 2001 by Peter Davey

The public realm is not only composed of grand piazzas and boulevards. Small streets, courts and alleys are vital parts of the texture of the city, as this bold and sensitive Utrecht scheme shows.

During 1995, in an attempt to make their city even more attractive to tourists, the burghers of Utrecht decided to make a museum quarter in the medieval centre of the city. Starting at the Central Museum for art, it stretches along Lange Nieuwstraat (now one of the oldest thoroughfares in the city) to terminate in the new university museum. Some way down, on the east side of the street is the thirteenth-century St Catherine's Cathedral and the Catharijneconvent, two hundred years younger.

The convent is part of the Museum of Religious Art, the other element of which is a grand eighteenth-century house on the Nieuwegracht on the other side of the block. Here was the entrance to the museum. When they were renovated in 1974, house and cloister were linked by a tunnel under the back garden. The decision to create the new museum quarter meant that access to the museum had to be from Lange Nieuwstraat, in effect turning the house round, and making a new access route through the cloister (created in the fifteenth century by making a U-shaped figure against the south wall of the cathedral).

Hubert-Jan Henket and his team have led a public route from Lange Nieuwstraat through the cloister, into an inner court on the site of the old back garden, past the new entrance to the museum in the back of the eighteenth-century house, then along its side out to Nieuwegracht. One of the principal problems in generating the new route was to keep members of the public who simply want to get from one side of the block to the other apart from the secure and tranquil spaces of the museum. (Previously, the cloister was self-contained, with no through traffic, so there was no conflict.) Henket solved the problem with one bold basic move: creating a glass and metal bridge at first floor level along the north side of the cloister. It connects the two ends of the first floor of the convent, making the whole space more legible. And at the same time, it provides a covered way, giving direction and protection to the route to the inner court.

Here, an elegant new wood and steel canopy heralds the main entrance, partly covers the new cafe, and moderates the bluntness of the 1974 brick back of the eighteenth-century house on Nieuwegracht. The 1974 interior is much altered, opened out and filled with light from the new cafe, and from a new tall window which illuminates the stairwell (and lift lobby) that lead visitors to the upper floors of the house or down to the tunnel. At the tunnel's other end in the cloister is a new glass-enclosed lift and stair, which replaces a 1970s one (and re-uses its oak). The glass lift in its vertical transparent shaft provides an overview of the whole structure of the museum, from basement to attic, the approach routes and the courts. What had been a very complicated and confusing building has become much more clear (though no-one would actually call it simple, because it does of course reflect the densely woven historic texture and grain of old Utrecht).

Undoubtedly, the most controversial element in the new composition is the glass bridge across the cloister, which runs hard up against the Gothic wall of the cathedral and makes no concessions to it (apart from transparency -- the luminosity of the great church is scarcely affected). It is hard to imagine a country other than the Netherlands which would allow such an intrusion into a medieval court. (Imagine, for instance, what a dreadful piece of smarmy pastiche would have emerged in Britain, even if the idea had been countenanced in the first place.) In fact, the architects have been no more radical than their predecessors five hundred years ago. Then, they were not afraid to transform and enhance the existing using the most up-to-date techniques. That is what has been done now, and the texture of the fabric and life of the city has been enhanced. And, after all, if tastes change in future, the finely honed glass, steel and wood structures can be removed with ease, for they touch the old buildings lightly.