Oct. 29 (Bloomberg) -- The robe and headdress worn by the British military officer known as Lawrence of Arabia will go on view at Oxford University’s Ashmolean, among the star displays at Britain’s oldest museum when it reopens Nov. 7 after a 61 million pound ($100 million) overhaul.

The Oxford-educated officer, whose real name was T. E. Lawrence, played a part in the Arab Revolt of 1916-1918 and later wrote “Seven Pillars of Wisdom.”

The 326-year-old Ashmolean has just been modernized by U.S.-born architect Rick Mather (who also revamped London’s Wallace Collection) and says it’s also putting back on show the largest and most important group of Raphael drawings in the world.

A 10-month redevelopment doubles the museum’s display spaces. While galleries were previously separated by department and geographical origin, they are now sequential in a way that “emphasizes cultural contact and exchange, rather than cultural difference,” said Ashmolean Director Christopher Brown.

“We can show more of our collections, and we can show them far better,” Brown said, as he took reporters around the building yesterday.

The Ashmolean first opened in 1683 to showcase collections given to Oxford University by Elias Ashmole (1617-92). In 1845, the museum moved into a neoclassical building designed by Charles Cockerell, with a columned temple-like portico and two wings jutting out from each side. Subsequent additions, not part of the Cockerell design, were made to house the expanding collections. Mather removed those later additions and built over them, creating a seamless transition from the old into the new.

“Our brief was very simple: more space,” Mather said. “It was a completely built-up site with no room for building.”

New Design

Mather decided to design something new to fit behind the Cockerell original, not do a pastiche. “It would have been an insult to him, and looked stupid,” he said.

His extension consists of a central atrium around which six levels of display rooms have been built; these are connected to each other via footbridges. Use of natural light, glass panes, and split levels allow visitors to see from one section into another, making the cultural connections that the museum’s director intended.

To the museum’s antiquarian founder, Ashmole, visiting the collection was “like going around the world in a day.” Museumgoers will get that feeling as they start with ancient Greece and Rome, pass through galleries of Islamic and Indian art, gaze at Italian Renaissance paintings, and end up with Pre- Raphaelite artists in 19th-century Britain.

Palace of Minos

The museum has taken the opportunity to question past findings, including those of Arthur Evans, the Ashmolean’s onetime keeper. His excavations (1900-1931) on the island of Crete and the interpretations he gave them were most important at the Palace of Minos at Knossos.

Brown said research had since shown Evans to be wrong on more than one front. He said one lesson visitors had to draw was “not believing everything they read on labels in museums.”

The museum attracted 400,000 visitors a year before it closed for refurbishment.

“I want more people here,” Brown said. “This is a very large museum.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Farah Nayeri in Oxford farahn@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: October 29, 2009 04:29 EDT