The Press MONDAY, MAY 21, 1973. A new or extended art gallery?

Press, Volume CXIII, Issue 33230, 21 May 1973, Page 12

The Press MONDAY, MAY 21, 1973. A new or extended art gallery?

The Christchurch City Council will tonight receive a prescription for an extension to the Robert McDougall Art Gallery. The proposals by the director of the gallery (Mr B. D. Muir) are for a building much larger than the present gallery and for an arrangement of exhibition spaces very different from those in the present building. Apart from the extra space that is sought for storage, administration, staff offices, and loading and preparation areas, about half of the extension would be divided into two large galleries. One would be for the exhibition of the permanent collection; the other would be for temporary exhibitions, of which the gallery already has an almost continuous series. The present gallery would still be used for showing the permanent collection. Mr Muir has produced good reasons for having two large exhibition rooms—each of 7000 sq. ft. Although the flexibility such rooms would afford is the foremost of these reasons, many great galleries around the world manage very well with permanent rooms of more intimate dimensions. The proposals are sufficiently important and expensive for the council to consider whether Christchurch deserves not merely an extension to the McDougall gallery but a completely new gallery on a new site. The present site has much to commend it, even if extensions spread over an area of the Botanic Gardens. But there are also many disadvantages and the greatest of these is the difficulty of access to the gallery. This might be remedied by sacrificing yet more of the gardens to obtain an enclosed approach to the gallery on the south side of the Canterbury Museum. The prospect that the city will take over the buildings of the University of Canterbury in Rolleston Avenue should be considered in connection with the planning of a larger gallery. None of these buildings at present offers very satisfactory quarters for a new gallery. But if the cost of a new or extended gallery is compared with the cost of new and renovated swimming pods, or with the money being spent on reading and bridges in the city, the cost of making part of the university buildings suitable for a gallery might not seem prohibitive. Given sufficient ingenuity and finance, architects and engineers might be able to contrive a very satisfactory and accessible gallery on the university site. Alternatively, the site now occupied by the Rolleston House university hostel would be a splendid site for a new gallery. These other possibilities should be explored on behalf of the whole metropolitan region before the City Council alone embarks on gallery extensions. There can be little doubt that the present gallery could be put to good use in the near future by the Canterbury Museum, which has collections that would lend themselves to display in the McDougall building.