After such landmarks, you could almost miss Hopkins’ Manchester Art Gallery extension. This is an exercise in extreme understatement, to be compared with the new galleries at Tate Britain in London. Entering these calm new spaces, grafted onto the back of the existing 1837 Charles Barry building but separated from it by a glass vestibule, is to encounter a different way of thinking. Here is architecture doing nothing but serving a precise function, with elegance and restraint, in stone, glass and steel. Rather than saying: “look at me!”, it’s saying: look at the art. After all the exhausting gesturalism of Manchester’s other new buildings, this - along with some but not all of the new civic open spaces - comes as a blessed relief.