Ulster Museum

The Ulster Museum stands as a massive, brutalist block of grey stone grafted onto the original Victorian red-brick building. Inside, a skeleton of the final great auk shot in Ireland rests in a glass case, a relic of a bird once so common that naturalists plucked them by the dozen. When the museum underwent a major expansion in the nineteen sixties, architects fused these two eras together, creating a jagged silhouette that dominates the edge of the Botanic Gardens.