Ready for some magic

摘要

It is finished. Though the re-launch of Manchester's Whitworth art gallery went with a bang - with artist Cornelia Parker's explosive pieces spilling out into a firework display in its park - for its architect, Stuart McKnight of MUMA(McInnes Usher McKnight Architects), the process has been the gathering together of disparate elements, the final reckoning. 'I felt we were completing it,' he says. The way he tells the story it has been a long haul for the Whitworth. MUMA's project has rationalised, extended and enclosed this gallery in a park. It started life as Grove House, used as a gallery from 1890. Then James Beaumont started building alongside it, first the front section in fully blown high Victorian, and then working back - away from the long drag of Oxford Road, stage by stage over 15 years before finally demolishing the house and building over its footprint.