ARTS
Architecture
White gallery by the sea .
Alan Powers praises the thoughtfulness of the new Tate Gallery building at St Ives
Awell-lit, spacious depository for all tempestuous process' was how Adrian Stokes described Carbis Bay, near St Ives in Cornwall, where he lived during the war. The phrase fits neatly to the new Tate Gallery building by Evans and Shalev, over- looking Porthmeor Beach, a name familiar from the titles of paintings, although better-known locally for its surfing.
To take the inside of this spacious depos- itory first, it is a skilful piece of planning, using the three levels of the site and mak- ing a classic example of a promenade archi- tecturale, a sequence of views and changing shapes which the architects, who know the town well, intended should mirror the experience of walking through narrow streets and seeing views opening up between houses. The open rotunda entrance, a memory of the gas-holder for- merly on the site, leads into a tall hallway dominated by a stained-glass window by Patrick Heron, and then to stairs climbing to the main gallery level. After a sheltered, low-ceilinged first gallery, the view opens around the unexpectedly grand space shaped by the rotunda, with two levels of gallery and views across the beach. In a long, curved case on the upper level are displayed the pots of Bernard Leach, below are paintings and sculpture, but the view is everything, including the welcome feeling that one is above but not separated from bathers and surfers on the beach, fishing boats crossing the bay and clouds in the 'sky.
The sequence of galleries continues agreeably but more conventionally, return- ing to the starting point, where a double stairway leads up to a light-filled café like a conning tower. Everything here is white, apart from the food. This building is evi- dence of great thoughtfulness, and its cre- ation largely through public funding is one of the minor miracles of our time. Its edu- cational role will surely be greater than if the same sum had been spent on Millbank. In a holiday town, where most of the visi- tors care little about art, it may attract and hold the attention of a few, for whom Porthmeor beach will thereafter have some added meanings.
Art has flourished by the sea in Britain for a combination of reasons — the light, the holiday atmosphere of summer and Inside the rotunda at the Tate Gallery, St Ives mysterious love-affair between painters and fishing boats. How to respond to this in architecture? One attempt is Kettle's Yard in Cambridge, a private collection made public in a domestic setting, a sort of inland St Ives. There, the new gallery added by Sir Leslie Martin and David Owers in 1971 is top-lit, enclosed and spatially fluid. The St Ives Tate is unavoidably more institutional, and follows in many respects the Crown Courts at Truro by Evans and Shalev of 1988, which also links interior and exterior and creates a promenade.
Since before the war, the debate has con- tinued on the extent to which modern architecture can or should be localised. The late Sir James Richards often spoke of his vision of the local architect being like the local doctor, knowing the development and needs of his town or region like a patient. To Richards's disillusionment, in spite of isolated incidents this pattern never became established. The reason was surely that Modernism became an exclusive club with changing but nonetheless rigid rules tending to prevent a direct and simple relationship with local architectural tradi- tion. The St Ives Tate, for all its under- standing of the St Ives streetscape in terms of plan, looks externally alien and uncom- fortable. The buildings it abuts lack distinc- tion, but its sawn-off profiles derived from the sectional planning seem fussy. The cir- cular canopy over the rotunda is held up by two thin and widely spaced columns, whose position is dictated by the need to clear the view from inside, but the result suggests an architecture of conventional load and sup- port in which the support would be inade- quate. The exterior surface of the building is rendered with panels of white marble spar, like expensive coffee-sugar, a material `in keeping' with the nastiest monumental mason's tombstones. The stone commemo- rating the gallery's opening last month by the Prince of Wales is lettered so badly that even a monumental mason might be ashamed of it.
The building as a whole has been designed with many hard and cold surfaces, conventional for galleries but requiring greater alleviation through touches of craftsmanship which are lacking. Even the ash timber of the stairs has been stained white. The reverberation of sound in the areas of hard flooring is unsettling. White the importance of Bernard Leach and his pottery in the St Ives tradition is acknowl- edged in a loan display, the caption rather pompously says 'The Tate Gallery does not collect ceramics'. Something of this stand- offishness from the crafts has affected the whole building, producing as a token of 'art in architecture' only Heron's overscaled
and garish glass. While one may hail the building as a success, in its own terms and as an example of increasing flexibility in modern architecture, there is still a long way to go before achieving a building as natural and pleasing as a fishing boat.
Previous page
