MODEL RENOVATION.

This refurbishment and extension of one of Ireland's Model Schools sensitively rehabilitates a Victorian institution to house galleries and performance spaces.

The Model School was a benevolent Victorian institution in many Irish towns, educating children from both religious denominations, in Sligo -- a mercantile port in Ireland's north-west and home to the extended Yeats family of painters and poets - the local Model School fell out of use several decades ago. In recent years, arts groups began to use the building to host exhibitions of painting and sculpture, theatre and film. Now the premises have been refurbished and extended with a pavilion dedicated to the collection of a Miss Niland. This former town librarian was perspicacious in acquiring paintings by Jack B. Yeats and his circle. Jack Yeats, brother of the poet W.B., was Ireland's most important twentieth-century painter.

The school stands on a grassy hill facing south across the town. It is a two-storey structure with a subtly asymmetrical facade and subsidiary returns. It was decided to restore the now much-weathered Mountcharles sandstone only around the retained entrance and along the potentially dangerous cornices. The [pound]1.9 million budget is focused on a new gallery -- named after Miss Niland -- with international-level environmental requirements met by computer-controlled ventilation and lighting systems. The principal formal moves are to place this cedar-clad box in a former yard uphill from the school and to roof the interstitial space as a double-height patio/atrium. With judicious cuts in existing crosswalls and the introduction of skylights in the returns, this is the fulcrum about which the institution evolves.

The project's architects, Dublin-based Niall McCullough and Valerie Mulvin, have exploited the site's slope so that from the entry foyer, directly behind the school's original doorway, the visitor's view is attracted both leftwards and up some broad steps into this higher central space.

The atrium is paved in pale limestone and spanned by four west-facing light monitors above. From here are reached a theatre/cinema in the former school gymnasium and a cafe (behind one sliding glass door) located in the base of the exposed cedar box.

To the west, a single free-floating wall of white render tucks up to form an inviting bench. Between this screen and a more solid wall of board-marked concrete, stairs lead to the Niland and a pinwheel gallery sequence about the renovated upper floors.

Soon after graduating from University College Dublin in 1981, McCullough and Mulvin wrote A Lost Tradition, classifying Ireland's generic if often somewhat quirky architecture, The gallery scheme registers their interest in history and palimpsest. Three north-facing longitudinal skylights sit above the Niland Gallery as a zinc-clad hat. One band of stone set into its cedar skin seems to align with sill and cornice details of the adjacent Victorian wall. That portion, in turn, has its upper volume heightened with a fascia of render and cedar so that, whether inside or out, the ensemble reads as a planar agglomeration. Curators have thus a variety of stimulating, interconnected spaces with which to work.