1.1K 
In the course of our daily reporting, we often uncover unusual projects, places, or connections that don't make the final cut. Instead of keeping it to ourselves, we're pleased to share our weekly Architrivia.
One hundred years after the infamous sinking of the RMS Titanic, the 2012 grand opening of the £97 million Titanic Belfast museum welcomed the centrepiece of Belfast's Titanic Quarter, a multi-year revitalization project currently unfolding at the Belfast Harbour. Today home to one of Northern Ireland's premier tourist attractions — the museum takes in 800,000 visitors per year — the Harbour has also become the address of Paint Hall Studios, the production site of HBO's smash hit Game of Thrones, along with numerous outdoor locations strewn across Northern Ireland. Beyond this, the former shipyards and docklands have also become home to a small but growing collection of condo towers, a new hotel, as well as a collection of restaurants and retail. Additionally, befitting the area's naval history and the strong connection to emigration for both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, the Titanic Quarter is also home to the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, where people of Irish descent can trace their ancestral roots back to Medieval times.
Deigned via a partnership between Eric Kuhne and Associates and Todd Architects, the eight-storey, 130,000-square-foot museum and exhibition space is clad with roughly 3,000 shards of silver anodized aluminum. The iconic structure stands 126 feet, or precisely the same height as the hull of the Titanic, which was constructed just outside the museum's main entrance. Built on the former shipyards and docklands of the Harland & Wolff company, which built the Titanic, along with her sister ships the RMS Olympic and RMS Britannic, Titanic Belfast has been highly successful in breathing new life into a long-neglected corner of post-industrial Belfast.
Visitors to Titanic Belfast can expect to spend an entire day wandering through the museum exhibits, which include the history of Belfast's shipbuilding legacy, along with countless artifacts from the famous ship, reconstructions of First and Third Class accommodations, recordings of survivors' accounts of the sinking, and a theatre presentation of Dr. Robert Ballard's footage of the ship as she lays now, 12,000 feet below the Atlantic. Just outside the museum, both the remnants of the shipyard and dry dock can be seen in person, providing visitors with a firsthand glimpse of the impressive size and scope of the world's most famous ship.
While the shipyards have been dormant for years, the long-neglected site has come back to life thanks to the vision which brought about the creation of the Titanic Quarter. The museum, along with the other attractions, return a sense of civic pride to a space whose only claim to fame had been one of the most well-remembered naval disasters in recent memory.
Do you have building trivia to share? Join the conversation in the Architrivia Tipline thread in our Forum.
