Take Bath, Unesco world heritage site and city of bonnets. Built as a stage set for 18th-century socialites, it is now a TV set for the endless clattering of carriage wheels in endless Jane Austen adaptations. It is a rare example of a city created as a unified set piece, where its crescents and streets create a coherent composition formed with similar classical details, out of the same local, honey-coloured stone: rare, especially in Britain, where the usual tendency is for improvisation and agglomeration of different styles.
It is also a city where some unfortunate additions of the 1960s – despite their use of that same Bath stone – gave rise to the fear that it was being imperilled, desecrated or, to use a word popular at the time to describe such outrages, "raped". So now, when a responsible museum proposes a back extension by a conscientious and skilful architect, it takes the best part of a decade to navigate its way to completion, through the shoals of planning refusals, hostile preservation groups, conservation officers who wanted it buried underground, and taste committees. Its main offence is that its architect, Eric Parry, wanted its ceramic cladding to be dark in colour rather then match the sacred stone.
The museum is the Holburne, whose collection includes bronzes, porcelain and paintings by the likes of Stubbs and Gainsborough. It is based on the bequest of Sir William Holburne who, as an 11-year-old midshipman, experienced the horrors of the Battle of Trafalgar, and – maybe as a form of therapy – later started gathering exquisite objects. It occupies what was once the Sydney hotel, at the end of the grand straight vista of Great Pulteney Street. To its rear are the wooded slopes of Sydney pleasure gardens, the only surviving example of places that, like Vauxhall and Ranelagh in London, were sites of entertainment and assignation. Boring through the gardens, showing much less tenderness than is nowadays expected of new construction, is the cutting for Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Great Western Railway.
The hotel was at the edge of Bath's great stone composition, with buildings to its front and garden behind. It marks the point where a 1790s credit crunch ended the speculative surge that had driven the city forward, where its classical universe stopped expanding. Grandly named sidestreets off Great Pulteney Street turn out to be stubs, going nowhere. A plan to ring the gardens with development, as John Nash would do around Regent's Park much later, never happened. It is a place of fronts and appearances, suggesting realities that are not quite there. The hotel itself presented a high, wide facade with a rather skinny building behind it. This building is now far from original, having been gutted and remodelled when it was made into a museum nearly a century ago.
Parry's extension is there to answer the needs museums often have, such as more exhibition space (60% of the exhibits now on show were previously in storage), disabled access, a cafe and room for education. It is substantial in relation to the existing building and makes no attempt to mimic its cornices and capitals. Instead, its exterior is built up in layers of glass and moulded ceramic. It grows more solid as it ascends, the reverse of usual expectation. The ceramic is mottled and distressed, with the dark greenish colour that has caused so much trouble.
Now it is there, it makes perfect sense. The glass allows views through the building to the lush trees and grass, while also reflecting them. The ceramic has its own, more subtle reflections, while picking up the colours of the vegetation. It is a melting, shifting thing; while it never loses all sense of being solid, parts of it seem to dissolve and reappear.
Rather than pay plodding homage to the stone city, it plays with the gardens it faces, and with the site's history of appearances, of being a place between town and nature, where nothing is quite what it seems. It is also a clever way of making the new building less obtrusive and, by being so palpably different from the original hotel, it allows you to see the form of the old clearly.
Seen on a dazzling afternoon it is one of the most delightful pieces of wrapping any architect has done anywhere, for some time. The interior doesn't quite live up to the outside, being rather practical and in places a little cramped, while doing a good job of letting the rooms of the old building breathe more freely. Yet this magic wrapping has been achieved in the teeth of opposition from the guardians of Bath's beauty, paid and unpaid, and has only been achieved by years of persistence, and some fancy footwork, by Parry and the museum.
First, planners told him to "lose the dream", then turned down his first application. Then they permitted a version with slightly reduced height, the result of a largely pointless haggle that is unhelpful to the compressed interior. They also demanded that the ceramic match the tonality of Bath stone. Some wiggle room was allowed, in that the tonal range of the stone includes light bits and dark bits, and Parry exploited this to the full, negotiating the colour back towards the one he first wanted. Had he not, and streaks of creamy yellow had been laid on the layers of greenish shadow and reflection, it would have been like putting Tipp-Ex on a Manet.
Meanwhile, the same planning authority has permitted SouthGate, a hefty new shopping mall recently built by the railway station which encloses large chunks of retail with a smear of obsequious hypocrisy. It uses Bath stone and details vaguely like Georgian ones, but without grace or sense: domestic windows are stuck without meaning on to commercial hulks and the stone loses all sense of its noble role as a thing that carries weight. Scale and proportion have gone awry.
Between this and the new Holburne I know which one has the better sense of history and respect for the past and the better understanding of the materials and structure of building. It is the one the planners and protesters did their utmost to stop.
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