As Adrien Brody’s Oscar-tipped new movie sparks fresh interest in modernist designs, expert Mark Hackett reflects on city’s concrete landmarks — from museums to motorways. Belfast City Hospital, Ulster Museum and the tomb of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. The late influential British architectural historian Mark Girouard once likened the Ulster Museum to “one of those incomplete Michelangelo statues in which a highly finished torso emerges out of a block of rough-hewn marble”.
In 1972, when the extension — a Brutalist design by Francis Pym that had been submitted as a competition entry that blended the Neoclassical lines of the existing building with austere cubist forms — was officially unveiled, some of Belfast’s citizens were less than enamoured with it..