THE award-winning architects designing Southampton’s heritage museum say they want it to be their greatest ever project.

Wilkinson Eyre’s list of current projects includes the London Olympics basketball arena, the new Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth, the London Museum redevelopment and the National Waterfront Museum in Swansea.

But the London firm’s director Keith Brownlie said the £15m Sea City Museum, set to open in 2012 on the 100th anniversary of the Titanic disaster, would be a landmark destination.

Daily Echo: Click below to see a video of today's headlines in sixty seconds

“Even though there are difficulties in terms of dealing with the existing building, it is a very exciting prospect. If we can help it, it is going to be the best project we have ever done,” Mr Brownlie said.

“That is our statement of intent.

We are not interested in the lowest common denominator and then getting out, for us it has to be special.”

Yesterday the Daily Echo exclusively published the latest designs for the museum, which will be in part paid for by Southampton’s great art sell-off.

A new art gallery and Titanic exhibition will be housed in the old magistrates’ courts and in a cruise-liner shaped glass extension on the west wing of the Civic Centre.

Shoppers in Southampton gave a largely positive response to the designs.

Alexandra Felton, 60, retired nurse said: “The design strikes me as a bit avant-garde. Any culture for the city is a fabulous thing.”

Christine Derrick, 38, a housewife from Totton, added: “I’m worried it will look odd against the Civic Centre. It’s a nice design though and I hope it will be a success.”

Mr Brownlie said creating a modern extension that complemented the 77-year-old Civic Centre was a big challenge.

“We do a lot of work with existing buildings, but we are not conservationists, we are contemporary architects and our job is to make a modern intervention that speaks for the old building but also speaks for the age in which it was created,” he said.

Conservative-controlled Southampton City Council wants to pay a third of the construction cost by selling two pieces of art from the city’s renowned collection.

The sale of a sculpture by Auguste Rodin and a painting by British artist Alfred Munnings is expected to raise about £5m.

Construction would start in October next year and complete in April 2012, in time for the centenary anniversary of the tragedy that claimed 1,523 lives.