Pastoral idyll - Munkenbeck and Marshall's design of a gallery at the New Art Center in Wiltshire, UK

Architectural Review, The, Feb, 1999 by Penny McGuire

A new gallery for paintings and sculpture is a harmonious addition to a sculpture park set in the grounds of Roche Court, an English country house.

Before the Gucci-ization of Sloane Street and its transformation into just another dull parade of expensive international chain stores, there was the New Art Centre. Established in 1958 by Madeleine Bessborough, this was a central London mecca throughout the finest period of British Modernist art, and the departure of the gallery in 1993 in the face of redevelopment was London's loss. The New Art Centre moved to the Bessborough family home at Roche Court in Wiltshire.(1) This handsome grey stone house, built in 1804 by Lord Nelson but never occupied by him, stands upon a garden eminence facing south down a great valley. Over the past seven years an extraordinary sculpture park has taken shape in the grounds with pieces by Barbara Hepworth, Bryan Kneale, Hubert Dalwood, Reg Butler and many others set in the surrounding garden and rolling parkland. The old walled kitchen garden has become an enclosure for inscriptions by letter cutters.

But the newest important acquisition by the Centre is a gallery for paintings and smaller sculpture designed by Munkenbeck & Marshall. A graceful, harmonious addition to the place, it steps up the slope of the garden from the east side of the house to a small orangery on the east. Running along the rear, forming the rear gallery wall, is the raised south wall of the kitchen garden. In devising the structure the architects have been ingenious. Quite a large pavilion, 20m long and 4.5m wide, seems invisibly constructed and to float on nothing much, anchored either side by the weight of history. On the south the building gives directly onto a lawn shaded by magnificent quercus ilex. Barely sealing off interior from exterior, the wall has six full-height glass panels separated by fissures of air that prevent them from steaming up inside. Two full-height doors panelled in heavy English oak divide the glass wall into three sections, pivoting on and concealing the structural columns holding up the roof. Somehow the transparency of the wall is heightened by the vertical emphases provided by the doors.

The practice has performed a similar sleight of hand with the roof. This is in fact a traditional plywood structure supported by bent steel beams at 6.5m centres. The underside was clad with aluminium panels and the whole given an aerofoil-like section with a fine metal nose. Canted up over the glass wall the roof structure disappears and all you see is a thin metal edge. At the rear the structure is held away from the wall by a section of beam shaped like a grasshopper's leg to admit a rooflight running the length of the building. Composed of translucent glass it obscures the structure from view but allows light to wash over the back wall. The main public entrance beside a weeping silver pear is in the east face of the orangery which has been restored. In warm weather when the doors are left open you simply walk in off the lawn. Falling into three broad levels as it steps through the sloping site and washed with light and shadow, the gallery has an austerity and sculptural power that accord with those of the exhibits. Detailing is immaculate and surfaces left plain - walls under the aluminium and glass ceiling have been simply finished in putty coloured plaster to match the concrete floor and stone treads. In this setting, the client points out, white would have been glaring.

Harmony is an increasingly rare commodity these days when architectural discord is in fashion. The architects' interpretation of the spirit of the place is restrained and lyrical, and the delicacy with which he has stitched the new to the old recalls Foster's work at the Royal Academy (AR December 1991). People have complained about the commodification of art and its sterile isolation in galleries for decades. The New Art Centre is fundamentally a business but at Roche Court, which evokes memories of Louisiana,(2) sculpture is invested with dignity. Art, buildings and landscape are allowed to speak for themselves.

1 New Art Centre, Sculpture Park and Gallery, Roche Court, East Winterslow, nr Salisbury, open 11-4 daily.

Tel: 01980 862244; fax: 01980 862447.

2 Louisiana Museum at Humlebaek, north of Copenhagen, by Bo and Vilhelm Wohlert (AR August 1995: Learning from Louisiana by Peter Davey, pp4-5).