Solid Citizen

Architectural Review, The, May, 2000 by Caruso St John

ART GALLERY, WALSALL

The small English town of Walsall now has a beautifully and meticulously built new gallery to house a cherished local art collection. The building transcends its modest origins to create a dignified and accessible civic institution.

Such a lofty magnificence! And built with stone, upon a hill! One of the proudest piles! ever beheld! George Byng, after visiting Hardwick Hall in 1789. [1]

At first glance Walsall seems an unremarkable town sitting in the shadow of Birmingham. Having received its first charter in 1159 it became a centre of leather working and subsequently grew during the Industrial Revolution before being affected by changing patterns of manufacturing and business. Selected as the winner of an open international competition in 1996 (by a jury that included Jeremy Dixon and David Chipperfield) and subsequently funded from the national Arts Lottery, its New Art Gallery opened this year. It is an inspiring and rare example of enlightened public patronage of the arts, urban regeneration and architecture.

Commissioned by Walsall Metropolitan Borough Council and planned for a site between the high street and a Victorian canal, the building houses the Garman Ryan Collection. Lady Kathleen Garman, a local resident and wife of the sculptor Jacob Epstein, assembled the collection with the artist Sally Ryan and presented it to the town in 1973. By combining it with galleries for temporary exhibitions, a shop, restaurant and generous educational facilities for the community, this new building realizes the extraordinary value of that gift.

The collection includes drawings, paintings and sculpture by Durer, Rembrandt, Monet, Constable, Van Gogh, Epstein, Modigliani and others. Its particular history prompted the architects to reconsider the gallery as a type and study its origins in the domestic spaces of the English house -- studies which articulated alternatives to the detached monumentalism and institutional character typical of many modern galleries. Robert Smythson's Hardwick Hall, completed in 1597, with its distinctive silhouette, delight in pattern making, European references and particular domesticity, inspired Caruso St John. By adopting a cross hall plan for the new building that recalls Smythson's they have devised an organization which is legible and creates public spaces which clearly serve the galleries. Like Hardwick, this building is compact and tall with a series of staircases threaded informally through six floors. Planned to offer long views that orientate and glimpses that surprise, these staircases are generous in their di mension and detail, yet clearly derived from the domestic.

The Garman Ryan Collection is located on the first floor in 13 rooms grouped around a double-height hall. Kahn spoke of his Mellon Gallery as an English hall that introduced you to the whole house [2] and Caruso St. John have created such a space at the heart of this building that speaks for the whole. It connects a series of rooms which are modest in size and planned with windows to make reference to the character and quality of a private collection made public and to connect it to the town.

In sharp contrast, a gallery for changing exhibitions, located close to the main entrance, takes on the shape and proportion of a shop window to connect to the high street across a newly made square, while a series of large open galleries on the third floor provides naturally lit, loft-like spaces for temporary exhibitions. Above these temporary galleries the rooftop has been assertively dedicated to public use. Planned with meeting rooms, a restaurant and a public terrace, it recalls Smythson's readings of roof as new ground to create a lookout over the town -- a civic gesture that inspires and exhilarates.

While there is clearly an effort to encourage social transparency in this project, Walsall's Gallery is not 'more glass than wall'. Its boxy form is conspicuously solid. Clad externally in stainless steel panels at the street and a silver grey terracotta shingled rainscreen above, the windows vary in size. Each is framed in stainless steel and detailed flush with the cladding. This exploration of pattern, surface and materiality also brings to mind Kahn's Mellon Gallery and his prediction that 'on a grey day it will look like a moth; on a sunny day like a butterfly'. [3] Designed to acknowledge the immediate surroundings -- modest buildings with carefully composed windows in masonry facades aggregated with squat '60s towers into an informal but distinctive fabric -- Walsall's Gallery avoids parody. It becomes both good neighbour and distinctive figure with a lofty magnificence that defines the 'proudest of piles'.

The New Art Gallery is built from a limited palette and meticulously detailed yet without fetishizing the detail. The in-situ concrete structure is exposed internally and the pattern of narrow vertical shuttering boards made clearly legible. As if to recall the ancient house, this structure is lined with Douglas fir floors and wainscoting in spaces which require special recognition. Detailed with the same dimension and orientation as the shuttering of the concrete, these linings make reference to the conspicuous layering of construction, to time and the sequence of making.