A Most Generous Gift to the City

Our brief was to transform the Burrell Collection into the most accessible and beautiful and decorative arts museum in the world. This was our third time working with Glasgow Museums following the success of both Kelvingrove and Riverside and we brought our understanding of their values to the bring their vision for the Burrell to life.

The Burrell Collection welcomed 500,000 in its first year and contributed £20 million to Glasgow’s economy. This is remarkable as it reopened in the wake of Covid-19 with its longstanding impact on visitor numbers.

The privilege of re-imagining a museum as cherished as the Burrell Collection was alive to our team from the outset. We developed a masterplan sensitive to the site, the objects and, crucially for a Glasgow Museum project, audiences. To do so, we assembled a masterplanning team of architects, engineers, accessibility consultants and audience specialists. The completed plan won £16 million funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, their largest award at the time.

The Burrell’s country park setting and modernist architecture inspired our design. We created new entrances, a piazza, outdoor café to dissolve the boundary between museum and park. The colour palette is influenced by the interplay between earth and stone, while original architectural elements become features in the gallery spaces.

The interpretation unlocks the objects’ backstories to increase their relevance to a broader, contemporary audience. In tandem, we created more space for exhibits: 90% of the collections are shared with visitors, compared to 20% before.

This level of change was made possible by our multidisciplinary team at the masterplan stage and was successfully delivered due to our management of the design process from start to finish.

Accessibility was at the heart of our interpretative approach. The artefacts are treated as more than just beautiful objects for elite entertainment: they become portals to unlock stories of their origins and journeys. Who made them? What historical events have they borne witness to? How have they come to be in Glasgow? Visitors are brought into Sir William Burrell’s world of collecting as his voice becomes an interpretive thread running through the displays. For the first time, we opened up two new floors of gallery space and made 90% of the collections accessible, compared to just 20% before.