- Client: The Courtauld Institute of Art
- Sector: Heritage & Special Projects
- Region: London
- Services: Special Projects, Construction Management
- Completion Date: 2021
We had a series of principle aims.
They were to do with the conservation of this fantastic historic building.
They were also to do with making it accessible,
making the works beautifully visible and enjoyable,
and creating spaces in the building,
which would be actually new, i.e. not a part of the original,
but which would make the functionality of the building really flexible for
the future.
When William Chambers designed the building,
he designed it for nine different organisations to be housed in.
We were working to bring an organisation more closely together in a building
that was designed to separate out organisations, with respect for the
historic nature of the spaces and their qualities.
We also had to soften those interventions to create a
conversation.
We developed an approach where there was some extremely significant
interventions in the building. Tunnelling through the vaults,
bridging across the second floor galleries,
and we combined that with thousands and thousands of small adjustments,
which I would hope most people never notice.
You have to strip away a lot of architecture to understand what's underneath it,
to really find what the thing's about. Once you've done that,
you can then build up your strategy and response to that.
The rewarding thing at the end is now people seem to talk about the artwork
more.
They notice details and things about the pictures and paintings more than they
did. The accessibility into the front doors was part of the competition,
so everyone had to put forward a proposal for how they would achieve that,
because obviously that was deemed to be one of the most difficult things.
Grade one listed, very visible entrance space.
Like a lot of things on the project,
what we looked to do was find a balance between an intervention and a
restorative act. So we removed steps,
we put ramps into what were the side aisles. We reused the stone,
and we found the original quarry in the north of Sweden where the stone had come from,
and we went back to that quarry and got additional stone.
There
are so many wonderful museums around the world,
a lot of them feel quite similar.
And so we wanted this to feel distinctive and I think to create an
experience for visitors that was really personal and sort of memorable and to
encourage people to look closely at works and,
and I think that is achieved really by bringing the building and the collection
into a sense of unity, and having variety in the spaces and,
and a sort of overriding sense of calm and ease as you move from one space
to the next. Through a continuity of the architecture.
There's been an amazing sort of sleight of hand that the architects have pulled
off, which is that they haven't been able, for obvious reasons,
we've only got this building - there's not an extension,
they haven't been able to create huge amounts of new floor space,
although there's quite a bit of that. But what they've done,
I think in opening up the flow of the building and relighting it,
and the redisplay that we've done of the collection is make it feel much,
much bigger than it did before.
And there's a bit of truth to that in terms of the actual floor space,
but it's also about the presentation and the whole series of very subtle
interventions that have gone into the transformation of the building.
English (United Kingdom)
