UK | Nottingham | Art Gallery | Caruso St John Architects

lllARKlll · November 15, 2009

Building Study

Caruso St John's Nottingham curtain raiser

13 November 2009

By Ellis Woodman

The dramatic green and gold facades of the Nottingham Contemporary art gallery are an outward expression of its relationship with the city

Now here is a telling coincidence. Today’s opening of Caruso St John’s gallery and performance venue Nottingham Contemporary falls all but exactly on the 10th anniversary of the building that first brought the practice to international attention, the New Art Gallery in Walsall. When Adam Caruso mentioned this to me last week it came as a double shock: first at the memory of quite how young he and Peter St John had been when they undertook that very considerable project — today they are 47 and 50 respectively — and secondly at the realisation that it has taken a whole decade for them to complete another new-build public building. Having built what was arguably the architectural highlight of the slew of public projects realised in this country at the turn of the millennium, they might reasonably have expected that things would pan out otherwise. That is not to say that they haven’t built significant projects in the interim — notably the Brick House, the refurbishment and expansion of the Museum of Childhood, the two new classroom blocks at Lasdun’s Hallfield School and the remodelling of a public square in the Swedish town of Kalmar — but it is only with the Nottingham project that they have found the opportunity to revisit a number of the themes that they explored with such conviction at Walsall.
This is immediately evident as we get off the train, climb the pedestrian bridge that crosses the tracks and catch sight of the new building 300m to the north. In front lies a wasteland of vacant plots and low-grade industrial use, while the 19th century brick and sandstone structures that make up the city’s Lace Market district offer a highly animated backdrop. Two pieces of infrastructure extend in parallel towards the building. The first is Middle Hill, a road that climbs steeply from the station, before running past the scheme’s western elevation and continuing uphill into the town beyond. The other is a level, elevated tram line which runs directly on axis with the building before swerving off at the last moment and discharging its traffic onto the road. The scene has also been shaped by a third piece of infrastructure that was abandoned in the early seventies, a branch line of the railway. Running along the ground, it followed the course that is now held by the tramline but where the tram swerves, the train ploughed on, initially through a 100m-long cutting and then into a tunnel that extended under the Lace Market. It is in the cutting that the new building has been constructed.
Needless to say, this eccentric siting imposed considerable challenges on the project, not least the need to reroute a number of major services that were installed in the tunnel in the decade after the train line was removed. It has also, however, allowed it to draw an extraordinarily large swathe of the city into visual dialogue. This is the first respect in which one senses echoes of Walsall. If we consider the way that the two buildings offer a visual terminus to the pieces of infrastructure they address — the tramline in Nottingham, the canal and its associated basin in Walsall — there is a clear parallel. In each case, the building co-opts the found condition, transforming it into something akin to a red carpet and borrowing the sense of grandeur which that image implies. While, formally, the new scheme is very much its own animal, the means by which it pulls off this trick are not dissimilar to those employed at Walsall. As was the case there, its expression is determinedly frontal, highly figurative and scaled to be read at a distance.

Credit: Morley von Sternberg

The building’s form responds to that of the neighbouring fabric.

The building’s external walls are faced in three different treatments, conceived as strata of variable height. A plinth condition is formed by black precast concrete panels which have been lent character by the use of a large aggregate and a high level of polish. These elements have a considerable depth which is revealed at the junction with the cladding units that are positioned directly above them. These too are in precast concrete but pigmented to a jade-like colour and acid etched. Each rises to the building’s parapet — the tallest is 11m — and is modelled to present a distinctive pleated profile. Every unit actually incorporates two such pleats although when viewed en masse, it is the scale of the pleat rather than that of the unit that registers. This reading is effected by the application of a narrow gold anodised aluminium cover plate both on the true junction between each unit and on the dummy junction that falls in the centre of each panel. Finally, two blocky volumes cap the building, one containing plant, the other providing the largest gallery with head height. For these, gold anodised aluminium has again been employed but as a uniform cladding. The grain of the panels remains a vertical one while the metal specified is of a gauge thin enough to allow each one to be tensioned to the point that it takes on a convex profile. The effect is of a wall of gilded corduroy.
The building presents itself as being built into the cutting rather than stood within it. Of the four elevations, it is only the south-facing one — by far the tallest, narrowest and most heavily fenestrated — which assumes a level of formality. The others are more topographic in character, buckling in response to the wayward course of the site boundary and, in the case of the long facade to Middle Hill, rising to a parapet line that mirrors the fall of the ground. That said, the building’s morphology is as much a product of the architect’s observations of the surrounding urban fabric as of its close reading of the micro-geography of the immediate site.
Thus we find that the green precast units rise to a height that approximates the eaves lines of the buildings to the east while the gold boxes on the roof extend the jumble of large volumes rising out of the high ground to the north. Of course, the unusual pliancy with which the building adapts itself to the contingencies of its setting is counterbalanced by the stridency of its polychromy. The green of its lower walls has been chosen for its complementary relationship to the reds of the neighbouring buildings, while the gold offers a vivid declaration of its public function. The scheme with which the architect won the 2004 competition for the project was markedly different to that which has been built. It comprised a tent-like form, gilded in its entirety — an image highly redolent of Scharoun’s Berlin Philharmonie. While that relationship may be much less explicit in the completed project, something of Scharoun’s conception of his building as a stadtkrone — literally, a city crown — remains a detectable influence.

Credit: Morley von Sternberg

External stairs negotiate the 13m level change across the site.

So far I have neglected to mention the feature of the building’s architectural expression that has proved altogether the most contentious: the lace pattern cast into the green concrete panels. The notion that the project might acknowledge the area’s lace-making history was present in the competition drawings in the form of a repeated supergraphic that carried across the building’s full extent. When BD published those images, following Caruso St John’s competition win, they met with a pretty vituperative response. The views of Ian Harris, a Nottingham-based correspondent, are indicative: “I can only guess that the kitsch novelty of sticking doilies all over the building seemed like fun at the competition stage, but it is a lazy and literal Disneyesque device and irrelevant in the site’s current context.”
I am not sure that I disagree: the strategy did sound like a cheap and populist gesture, hardly distinguishable from AHMM’s cringeworthy decision to paint its Barking housing canary yellow in honour of the lemonade factory that once occupied its site, or of Make’s reference to Birmingham’s history of jewellery manufacturing in the preposterous elevations of the office development it is building there.
If Caruso St John has managed to shake off those doubts — and, to my mind, it very largely has — it has done so by transforming a suspiciously hokey and graphic idea into one that is much more persuasively bound to the grammar of architecture. The change has principally been one of scale. Caruso says that, whatever the competition drawings suggested, the practice’s intention was always that the scale of the decoration should have a direct relationship to that of the building’s constructional articulation. The pattern is therefore reproduced at a size — two and a half times that of the archive sample on which it is based — that allows it to correspond to the width of one of the concrete pleats. On the major elevations, it extends up the full height of each pleat while on the minor ones it is restricted to the pleats’ uppermost 500mm — an articulation that carries obvious associations with the capital of a classical column. The treatment is of such a delicacy that one becomes aware of it only when stood really quite nearby. The building therefore communicates at two very distinct scales, a captivating quality and one that represents an important departure from the way many recent projects — even Caruso St John’s own Museum of Childhood extension — have sought to re-establish a place for decoration in the architect’s arsenal of formal strategies.
Even so, the question of whether the lace isn’t — let’s be blunt — a little naff, remains. I think what ultimately saves it from that accusation is the fact that while, yes, the motif has been rolled out in the service of a rather fishy contextual story, it has also been given a central role in the building’s tectonic narrative. Looking through the built and unbuilt work gathered in the recent Caruso St John monograph, Almost Everything, one is left in no doubt that this is a practice interested in making buildings of a very substantial character indeed. However, if we consider the way those buildings’ facades have been developed, we repeatedly find ourselves presented with a paradox: having constructed walls of such solidity, the architect has gone to fantastic lengths to deny a reading of them as instruments for carrying weight to the ground.

Credit: Morley Von Sternberg

Stairs down from the foyer.

Thus at Walsall, the enormous terracotta cladding panels are stopped at first floor level while the thickness of the concrete wall on which they are mounted is concealed by pushing the windows to the panels’ front face. What we are offered is, in effect, a curtain. That is an image to which the new building’s facades adhere even more closely still. The corduroy ribbing of the rooftop boxes and the pleating of the concrete are both clearly directed towards that idea with the effect that the lace motif is given the clear conceptual setting that it seemed to lack in the competition scheme.
In keeping with the notion of it as a curtain, for much of its length the facade denies us a reading of the thickness of the concrete panels. However, the one place that it does show its depth is at the building’s entrance. This has been located at the north-east corner of the site, where it addresses a small courtyard. Here, the wall treatment has been carried over part of the courtyard in the form of an enormous cantilevered cowl, allowing the underside of the panels to be exposed to view. It is a tremendous coup de théâtre, bringing the tectonic themes into clearest focus at the building’s most significant moment.
The wisdom of locating the entrance at this corner may not be immediately obvious. Certainly, it is not the most publicly exposed point of the site. That would be the crossroad-addressing north-west corner — the status of which Caruso St John has acknowledged through the provision of a large window which admits a view into the principal gallery. However, by locating the front door where it has, the architect has provided the building with a much more developed entrance sequence than it might otherwise have enjoyed and, equally significantly, drawn the external stair that extends down the gallery’s east elevation into a happier relationship with the passage of pedestrians around the site. While the stair doesn’t presently lead to anywhere of great note, the plan is to establish a bus station at its base. If that can be achieved, it will become one of the principal points of entry to the city, with the gallery’s front door ideally placed to benefit from the flow of passing visitors.
Providing a new home for two longstanding local arts organisations, Angel Row and Nottingham Trent University’s Bonington Gallery, the building has been designed around a programme comprising both temporary exhibitions and time-based events such as dance, drama and performance art — a mix of activities that the Bonington, in particular, has always sought to sustain.

Credit: Morley von Sternberg

One of the opening shows is devoted to David Hockney’s sixties work.

Stepping through the front door, we find the somewhat cryptic experience offered by the building’s exterior is exchanged for one of startling lucidity. The very first thing we see is one of the four galleries that occupy this floor, separated from us only by a glass wall. We can make out another gallery beyond, while turning sharp left out of the entrance lobby, we immediately catch sight of the glass doors of the other two rooms on the far side of the foyer. Within a few steps we are, in fact, granted an understanding of the dimensions and layout of the entire floor.
The sense that our relationship to the art on show is to be an unusually unmediated one is further enforced by the character of the foyer. While an enjoyable, serviceable space, this is purposefully not the architectural showpiece that the entrance of nearly every other new arts facility in the country seems to aspire to be. The consequence is that, for once, the galleries have been allowed to take star billing. The laconic manner in which the plan has been carved up and the consistency of the material palette actually suggests a strong sense of equivalence between the foyer and the galleries. What gives the art spaces the edge is the way in which they are lit. Three of them employ a field of small skylights, each of which is fitted with a light-reflective baffle in the form of an asymmetric truncated pyramid. This treatment — which clearly owes a good deal to Klas Anshelm’s 1975 Malmö Konsthall — provides the spaces with a wonderfully luminosity and an unusual lack of architectural figure. While the plans of two of the rooms are strongly determined by the drifting line of the site boundary the roof geometry accommodates these moments of potential awkwardness with ease.
The fourth gallery is something else. This is the one that presents the large window to Middle Hill and enjoys the increased volume provided by one of the gold aluminium boxes. At 10m in height it is a pretty epic affair and terminates in a single super-scaled version of one of the mini-skylights. The spatial variety that this offers can be extended by blacking out the galleries as needed, a process that requires an external cover to be fitted over each skylight. This has been done for the two rooms that house the opening exhibition of David Hockney’s 1960s Los Angeles paintings. The other galleries have been left naturally lit and given over to the work of the contemporary LA artist Frances Stark. While this kind of pairing promises to be a staple of Nottingham Contemporary’s programme, the spaces lend themselves equally well to larger exhibitions — most probably group shows — that would extend across all four rooms.

Credit: Morley Von Sternberg

The performance hall.

Heading downstairs from the foyer, we might imagine that we are entering the bowels of the earth so it comes as a happy surprise to find that our route has been amply equipped with windows. The one true black box space is the double height performance hall that has been sited two storeys below. We first catch sight of it through a large internal window that gives onto the staircase at level -1, a floor that is otherwise occupied by offices and an education room. Carrying on down, we find ourselves in a small foyer, which the performance hall shares with the south-facing café. The out-of-hours use of the hall — not least as the site of a regular club night — has imposed considerable security demands on the scheme. They have been answered by providing a secondary entrance through the café which will allow it to be accessed independently of the galleries above.If I have given the impression that the building is deterministic about the way its uses are distributed, the reality is quite otherwise. The seating in the performance hall can be retracted, allowing this lofty in-situ concrete shell to serve as an ideal site for a video installation. With rather more effort, the walls on the upper floor can even be stripped out transforming it into a stage for a large scale piece of performance art. Raw, adaptable arts spaces such as New York’s 112 Greene Street featured as prominent reference points in the architect’s discussions with its client. No doubt, the relatively conventional image that the spaces present in their current incarnation will soon be challenged by the artists that occupy them in future.
Indeed, the principle that the building is ripe for appropriation is vividly communicated by its internal detailing. Never less than visually refined, this is frequently of a quasi-industrial and even contingent character. The Dexion furniture and exposed services in the foyer are cases in point, offering a sharp aesthetic jolt after the lavishness of the outside walls. The fact that, at a number of locations, the architect has ceded design responsibility to an invited artist further enforces this message. In the café, for example, Matthew Brannon has applied a weirdly gimcrack timber trellis to the concrete walls while in a small room on the top floor, Pablo Bronstein has installed a group of 18th and 19th century cabinets of curiosity which will be used to stage a programme of micro-exhibitions.
Once the programme gets into full swing these kinds of local narratives will no doubt multiply. Caruso St John has created an extraordinary building that not only accommodates such moments but gives them a privileged place within the collective drama of the city.

Project team

- Architect Caruso St John Architects, Client Nottingham Contemporary, Structural engineer Arup, Elliottwood Partnership, Services engineer Arup, Quantity surveyor Jackson Coles, Theatre consultant Charcoalblue, Main contractor Sol Construction

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