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Interview with Adam Caruso and Peter St John 1.9.98
I'm Adam Caruso and I'm Peter St John and we are Caruso St John Architects and we have been working on our own since 1990.
AC I remember getting the brief. There was a small ad in the Architectural Press for the competition and we do a lot of competitions. And the more we have done the more we have become careful about which ones we would do. We didn't know where Walsall was and we didn't really know about the Garman Ryan Collection but we were impressed by the way in which they had decided to organise the competition. It was done in quite a sophisticated way, which suggested there had been a lot of thought into what they wanted to get out of the competition. Which is surprisingly rare amongst public clients or art clients, who you would expect to really be completely clued in to what they want and how they should get it. Obviously Peter [Jenkinson] had spoken to a lot of people and had been very conscious about how the way he runs the competition, and what he hopes to achieve out of the competition, will have an impact on the building. We were impressed by what they were asking for, by the judges on the jury, so we sent away for it and got the brief, which was quite long and a bit confusing, but it was all right and obviously some work had been done. I remember it was in August, the first deadline was the beginning of September, so we were each on holiday. So one of us went to visit and described it and then went on holiday and then the other one went to visit and described it. And we were both thinking about it. We then very quickly did the first stage; it was a two stage competition. The first stage was mostly what you had done and who you were and a very conceptual first idea of what you should do. For us the beginning of any project, a lot of it comes from the situation and the situation is the Site, its the political, the small 'p' political situation, what the politics of the project were and how we react to that situation. That's really where we get ideas and why we make projects. It seemed quite a complex one, in an enjoyable way and there was obviously this incredible ambition to make this public building really count in this town. There seemed to be ample justification for that kind of expression of the people of Walsall mattering. That all seemed to really be socially convincing and interesting for us. Because ultimately we are really interested in how when you make a building it starts to become part of the social context. This project seemed full of that kind of potential and we hadn't even met Peter yet.
AP Is that rare?
AC Rare? It's not so rare but I mean the Lottery, which is a very mixed kind of blessing, has at least made it possible for local authorities to again make things which are an expression of the population. In a way that hasn't been seen since late Victorian times, where you had a much more paternalistic, but none the less, an expression of a population's aspirations imprinted with a building or with a major project. After the war there were a lot of things built but housing was a huge concern. That's great and there were some fantastic achievements from that, but that's different because housing is giving people a home and hopefully preserving or making a community. Whereas a public building has a slightly rhetorical role. It can be an expression of a collective ambition or a collective deserving. And this project seemed to have all of those things so we were attracted to it.
I think on the continent where we do more competitions it’s more common because there is an expectation that you need to build public buildings and that they should be built properly because at the end of the day that's what's deserved. But its also the 'best value' because you build it properly and then you don't have to worry about it. But this project is full of those aspirations and a lot of lottery projects are not. A lot of lottery projects have a very elitist origin, or not an elitist origin, but don't seem to have a huge engagement with their local situation. I think now that we have been working here for three years we know that there are these amazing connections. Peter Jenkinson would be the first to say, 'the last thing Walsall needs is a New Art Gallery, but we can fund a New Art Gallery, so let's make it and really make people here be proud about it'. Because that's what a public building should do, some public buildings at least, they have that potential. So we were interested in that, and it isn't that common in Britain, I don't think, to have a new public arts building in the middle of a town. And that if you build it it will probably get used. Because of absence of doing other things in the town. You can really imagine it becoming folded into the life of the town. It’s difficult to achieve. In London its just another one of many, which is fine, and then I think there are other places where these new institutions are in some way slightly foisted upon them, or they are maybe out of town because they are convenient in other ways. This one is going to be in the middle of the town and will house a kind of collection which already has, there's an affection towards the Garman Ryan collection, amongst people here, and that seems really important.
AP What was the kernel of your conception for the New Art Gallery, because that's what was asked for, wasn't it, an idea?
P.St.J There are a lot of different levels of the idea but I suppose one thing that attracted us about the idea of this building that Adam has just described in this place was the potential effect of the building on the town. Which coming from London, which is such an enormous city where there isn't that potential that one individual structure can have such a significant effect on a place. That seemed really interesting. That Walsall isn't very big. It has a centre of a town which is very manageable and walkable and the effect of one major building could be very substantial. I remember the first time we visited the site. I came up while we were working on the competition, and initially it was very alarming because they were just about to start the construction of this new commercial development that's around the gallery which is now a new Woolworth's and British Home Stores. The site had been flattened in preparation for these buildings and several roads had been moved, and it was actually almost impossible to tell where the buildings were going to go. But there were two things about the site. One was the canal which looked extremely down at heel at that time, but it obviously had an amazing potential, being this ribbon of water that came in and stopped right close in on the edge of the town. And the actual location of the site being so close to the centre of the town. The potential was that if you could make a building which was of significant enough a height to start with, then you could look into the centre of the town and from around about the town you could see the building. In a similar way to the way that St Matthew's church, which is at the other end of the High Street, is a kind of recognisable land mark within the town, and the existing Edwardian Town Hall. That was the first idea for the building - was that it would have a physical presence equivalent to those other major public buildings and that those buildings together mark out the centre of the town.
AC We called it a city tower. In the first presentation we had a really old photograph of the Pallazio Vecchio in Florence, which was a tower but wasn't a defensive tower. It was actually, in those days, a public tower for the oligarchy who ran the town so those people at least could use the tower. The idea was that you could do, at the end of the 20th Century, a tower which was significantly more public. This sort of rhetoric. I mean we are not normally architects who are very interested in making buildings that stand out too much - a lot more of our projects are about insidiously connecting in ways that you only after a little while realise how connected the project is. But at first you might not notice it or its just a slight distortion or displacement of things that are already there. But here it really seemed justified because there was such a paucity of public building and because two of the other significant public buildings, the Town Hall and St Matthew's Church, already had this tower. One was at one end of the town, one was in the middle and we had this potential to do one at the other end, which was sort of the new end of the town, the Wharf end. So the City Tower that was one idea. And the other idea which came from the Garman Ryan collection was the idea of making a big house. That sounds nice because people live in houses and there is something accessible about a house. But it also seemed especially appropriate for the Garman Ryan collection, which was a domestic collection, which has the Garman and Epstein family represented within - their dogs and their kids and stuff. It has a very, very intimate scale. More practically we were thinking about how do you display a collection like that and trying to make galleries which were not general galleries - in other words top lit kind of Kunsthal galleries - but trying to make galleries that really did engage with the idea of a domestic collection. So side lit galleries, highly specific galleries, so you always knew where you were within the collection. The idea of side lit galleries also meant that you could look out into the town - like in a house you can always make as much of a connection as you want with where you are. Which is different than a kind off mat-like extended building, like Kunsthal type art space, or a train station or things like that which have a sort of general, much more deterministic lighting. So that seemed interesting. And then, not only was the Garman Ryan collection very intimate in scale but the rest of the brief, like the requirement for Kunsthal type space for temporary exhibitions, lots of education space and then the normal stuff that you have with galleries like catering and shop and things. It seemed that there was such an extended range of spatial conditions required by the brief which is something that we love - we kind of invent it when it doesn't exist in a building - that was house like as well - as houses have living rooms, dining rooms and they also have little cupboards off a bedroom or a linen closet. That's good, that's why people can, I think, understand the idea of a house better then some other sorts of building, because you have this range of scales of space. Maybe the big spaces are a bit difficult to get a hold on, but you could start with a little space, and then you could go to a middle-size space, and then to a big space and then you feel comfortable. And already, now that all the spaces are built on site, if not finished, you can feel that. Altogether they seem like quite a big building, although it's not a huge building, it's kind of a medium-size building, but they seem quite big. But on their own the Garman Ryan galleries seem really intimate and that's going to be the really special thing about it. So it will feel like this kind of crazily blown up arts and crafts or mediaeval house, where very unexpectedly you happened upon a really big space on the third floor and the fourth floor. And this house is kind of gathered up into this tower. Those were the two big ideas. The third idea was the idea of marking the edges of the centre of Walsall. That was something that this project had the capacity to do. And because it was behind BHS and Woolworth's you kind of had to do it and that's why we made it tall. It's one of the only projects we have ever done so far, that is taller than it is wide. It’s not something that comes naturally to us.
P.St. J We wanted to make a building where the experience of looking at the art was a very gracious experience, of wandering through the building. So the way the building is organised, as Adam was saying, is a series of suites of rooms - a suite of very big rooms, a suite a small rooms gathered around a hall. Or let's say a very big space like the foyer which has a series of smaller spaces gathered around it. And they're like clusters of rooms in different parts of the building and they are connected by staircases so that you can go from floor to floor. So the experience of going through the building is intended to be quite gracious, quite a grand experience of walking from room to room. And then you can look out of the windows and on the West side you can look down the canal. One of the opportunities of the canal was to link the building directly to this arm of the canal, and put the building right at the end so that again it has this quite grand relationship of this strip of water to the building. Not a romantic relationship to the canal, which has become the way in which the people have used canals, actually quite a specific structure......
AC Like a terminus with an axial relationship, like a terminal railway station has to its tracks. Its like the orientation of the canal registers vertically in the town.
AP It has got a fortunate aspect in relationship to the sun. In the evening the sun goes down and you’ve got that beautiful light going down the canal and hitting the windows of the building.
AC That's just luck.
AP What was confusing about the brief?
AC There were just little details. Whenever we do a competition we try not to worry too much about the details of it anyway and this competition was clearly meant to be about ideas, quite a conceptual competition to choose an architect. It was two stage and you present at the second stage so that the client would meet us and get some sense of how we worked. I think there were six people short listed and some were partnerships like us and some were firms that had one person at the head. And those things make a big difference as far as how a client can work with their architects. So the confusing things were 'What was meant by exhibition galleries?. Where they temporary exhibition galleries? Was there some other collection that we didn't know about? What was the exact ambition of the education spaces?' It was obviously important but it wasn't absolutely formed yet. They weren't problems. The brief was quite large and there were some things that you didn't quite understand because you didn't know what the other holdings of the institution were - but they didn't really matter. You knew what the Garman Ryan was. For the second stage it was clarified what an exhibition gallery meant - it meant a temporary exhibition gallery, mostly for contemporary art, which was all we needed to know. We could get on with it and since it wasn't a competition for a detailed design for the building that would then just be built without any discussion. If it's properly run that shouldn't be a big issue. There were some tough questions in the interview, especially from the architects who were trying to draw out how flexible we would be about certain things that were particularly idiosyncratic about the design, about the circulation in the building and the lighting and they were very well chosen questions. They were tough, but it was better to ask them then rather than when we had left and they had to wonder what we would think about those things. And we held our ground on some things and some things we were very, very relaxed about and obviously they were relaxed about it as well.
AP Just to recap, the first stage for an idea...
AC Was open and it was not anonymous so you were also showing what your experience was, what past work you had. And then it was three A-one boards that were very conceptual. And then the second stage, six architects were paid to do it and it was more detailed. We did some things in great detail - about how certain things would be built because we wanted to convey what our building would feel like in Walsall, but also what it would feel like to be in some of the major spaces of the building. So some of the design was conveyed in a very conceptual way - just to show this is how we would approach certain things. And somethings like the structure, the materials of the facade, like the differences in lighting between a Garman Ryan and an exhibition gallery - those were shown very very explicitly.
AP So can you talk about that because you have talked about the tower and the spaces but obviously the materials are really important?
P.St.J Just before we talk about the materials I think one thing that wasn't necessarily clear to us at the time of the competition was the relative importance, or the way in which the Gallery intended to use the two kinds of gallery space. Because there are the galleries for the collection and the contemporary gallery. Originally in the competition design we had the temporary exhibition galleries on the first floor, directly accessible from the ground and we put the galleries of the collection in upper levels of the building. I suppose one wasn't sure whether perhaps the Garman Ryan collection was a dusty collection of old paintings which was an excuse to get a lottery award. And what became clear as we worked, or very quickly in fact, was that that the collection itself is at the core of the educational activities of the Gallery and the Director and the competition jury group wanted the collection itself to be at the core of the building. So that was changed and the gallery rooms for the Garman Ryan collection are on the first and the second floor next to the education rooms which are right in the heart of the building. And the temporary exhibition galleries are now up on the third floor, which by the standards of most public galleries is a very unusual situation for them. But the fact is that because of the lifts in the building, which give you very quick access to any of the floors from the lobby, they are not less accessible. And there is this amazing experience, which we haven't felt yet, but there will be an amazing experience of coming out of the lifts directly into the major gallery of the temporary exhibition rooms. And standing in those rooms and looking out of some small windows onto the town is a pretty amazing experience which you can now see.
AC You also asked that question about materials and the idea behind the materials. At the beginning I said how the situation is really important - that's one thing that get us started usually. Then for us the big way of engaging with the situation is how we make our project. We are not architects who endlessly massage an elevation until its perfect. What we are more interested in is making quite conceptual decisions about how spaces or a facade should be materially constituted and then finding the right materials and the right way of handling those materials in order to achieve something. And it almost becomes like a machine once you have chosen the materials and once you start to know more and more precisely how you want the materials to be working, like making a sculpture or making a painting really. Then you can let that happen and you see what happens. So we knew we needed lots of types of windows and we knew we didn't want to grid the facade. So how could we come up with an idea where the windows were regulated by an idea of a facade? And that's the idea of these tiles which lap and they get smaller as they go up and they provide what are vertical zones into which windows can happen. But a window can be one tile or two tiles high or three tiles high and its even more flexible horizontally how wide a window can be, and yet all the windows fit within the tile system. But it's not much of a module because they shift around like tiles do. So we wanted to make art space which on the one hand for the contemporary space satisfied the expectation of white walls and a neutral floor and a lack of figure, so that you can install lots of kinds of art into the space without getting confused as to what's building and what's art. But on the other hand making the way the building is made, a kind of important conveyor of atmosphere or spatial character.
At the scale of the whole building, the way that happens is that the structure of the building is cast walls, which is quite unusual in this country, where usually buildings are frame with infill. So all of the walls are poured and for all intents and purposes each room is a poured box within the matrix of the whole building. And so the structure makes a little room and a medium sized room and a big room and these boxes are stacked in such a way that they make a three dimensional structure which allows a bunch of little rooms to make the structure for a very big room below them - they kind of become a space frame of rooms. That's how the ground floor can have no structure and the first and second floor have lots of structure. The structure of first and second floor is the spanning structure over the ground floor. So it's actually quite ambitious structurally but in the end you won't really notice it, all you will notice is this is a very big space and these are quite small spaces and there's another big space on top of them. And that's made by the structure, but the structure is also making the idea of the rooms. And then there is an idea that on the interior some rooms, the big rooms, would have more of the structure exposed. So they have these concrete joists. We try to make a concrete floor structure which is so fine it is almost like a timber structure, like a mediaeval timber joisted floor structure. And these concrete walls which are exposed have a board marked pattern which is left from the casting process. So it's concrete but its making these references to joinery. In the big rooms, like in the foyer or the restaurant on the fourth floor, a lot of this structural shell is exposed. In the small rooms like the Garman Ryan galleries its completely lined, so the structure is there but then the structure is covered with linings that are about making these domestic rooms. So there is a timber floor and a timber ceiling and there are plastered walls and there is a window which has a timber lining. And so the structure is quite a big thickness away from you because the structure of the building would overwhelm a room that's 4m x 6m, that has a window which has a figural proportion.
That's the idea on the inside. That the concrete building is almost like a warehouse that's providing different scales of space, and that warehouse shell is exposed where the space is big and is covered where the space is small. Not religiously, there are exceptions, but that's the general idea. On the outside there's no concrete because there are problems with how concrete weathers on the outside of a building in this climate, so its clad. But there are two ideas of cladding. The outside, the coat of the building, are these terracotta tiles which are lapped like roof tiles and they are made of clay like a roof tile and they have texture like feathers on a bird. They are quite delicate and you can see them now - they do feel quite delicate. But then there is a layer, beneath the terracotta outer coat layer, which is in stainless steel - and that's what happens at the ground floor of the building and at the very top of the building on the inside faces, and that's how a window is made. So its like the inside layers come out and project slightly beyond the rougher overcoat layer of the tiles. I guess using these two claddings is first of all a way of proclaiming that they are both claddings, so that you see the edge of the terracotta being laid on to the stainless steel, but its also a way of dealing with how you make the ground floor of the building vandal resistant, but also approachable and what's an appropriate material at the ground floor of the building. So stainless steel with the glass seemed like a good way of doing it - it was a way of making bigger openings than the openings that we were making in the terracotta, which on the whole are figural proportioned windows. So the inside and the outside of the building have this idea that there is a core, a shell in the building and its selectively lined on the inside, then clad on the outside. And those are the realities of contemporary construction. Contemporary construction is about cladding and lining and we are just trying to make it a bit more communicative. That's how its made and lets see what a cladding can be if you accept its only 30mm think. What does that mean? Not trying to make it look massive like a mediaeval stone building which has solid masonry walls because that's not how you build today. Building is multi layered.
AP Why?
AC Its to do with the speed with which things are built and technically how you can achieve weather tightness and an environmentally stable interior with a relatively thin build-up. You can make a solid masonry wall, but if a solid masonry wall is going to be water proof it has to be at least half a metre thick. That's very thick and still isn't super insulated. Whereas with contemporary construction - our walls are quite thick, about 600mm thick - but it's water proof and its highly insulated and you can make all the joinery and all the cladding in a factory somewhere and then bring it on to site. So that there's more control over how its made. Its just the way - its an example of specialisation - buildings are no longer made by one contractor, they are made by many contractors. Therefore different layers are made by different contractors and there has to be this kind of tolerance between layers and if you build well, its because you understand tolerance and you make something of it.
P.St.J I think what will be unusual about the building will be that all of these systems of construction have been used and chosen in such a way that they allow a fantastic amount of variety within that system. So for example there are a very large number of different kinds of windows - big windows, small windows, windows that open and windows that are fixed - windows of all different proportions. There are types of room but they vary in scale. I think those things can gather together in a collection of things into one big thing which has a real strength in it as an overall form, but will allow there to be quite a lot of intimacy and particular moments within the building. Like touching a leather hand rail or a beautiful window that you can stand by and look out of or a little room, which I think will be unusual in such a big building where generally you get far greater sense of repetition or sense of the overall form dictating every decision.
AP Excellence is word which Peter uses lot when he is talking about what goes on in the building, but its obviously also something which is important from what you are saying and from what I know about the demands that have been put on the construction process. Has it been easy to get what you wanted?
AC Its never easy. Because we don't build in a normal way - (P. St.J) and we're not there yet - so its always torture building things. I think if you care about what the final things going to be it is always quite difficult. And yes we are putting quite big demands on the people who are building the building. You have to hold your side of the bargain up. I mean we have produced an enormous amount of information through which the building gets built. But we are not doing it to be perverse - we are doing it to make a contemporary building be communicative through the way its built. So that means pushing certain things slightly sideways from how they would normally be used. That's generally how we achieve that kind of slight otherness about the presence the building will have, and I think Peter Jenkinson enjoys that. His thing about excellence is great for us because he has supported us very, very strongly when there has been pressure to compromise certain things, although we are not great compromisers. So it makes us a good team. But with a public building it is foolish not to build properly, because this building they expect there to be at the beginning 100,000 to 150,000 people visiting a year. Any building that's going to withstand that amount of traffic needs to be well built. So you have two options. You say we won't build it too well and then every six months you have to restore it or renovate it or make changes. Or you try to use materials which are inherently robust and which their aging process improves them somehow. In our building there is a lot of joinery, joinery that's just natural, just sealed. Joinery is something traditionally public buildings have and one doesn't mind a handrail or a door threshold wearing over time. And the ground floor of the building or ironmongery being stainless steel - yes its more expensive than aluminium but if you have a piece of ironmongery that's aluminium in a public building after six months it has very deep scratches because the material is too soft. When we do a house we will often use aluminium because we like that softness, it isn't as insistent as stainless steel, but in a public building its unrealistic. And quality is that and just on that level if you are making a public building it justifies spending a certain amount of money. And it's really sad how many projects, a lot of these Millennium projects, which seem very expensive, but actually, because they are so ambitious they are not expensive enough in the construction costs. And you wonder what the legacy will be - they will just fall apart. Whereas the last big public building splurge during the second half of the 19th century, with buildings like The Natural History Museum in London which is a great example. It's just so well built and the materials are so well considered, although a lot of them were new materials, that every five or six years when they clean the outside it looks like a brand new building because the terracotta facades have 250 years worth of life in them, at least, before the cleaning starts to be a problem. And now there are ways of cleaning that are completely non destructive so it lasts for a really long time. The inside of that building is the same and it seems with a public building you don't have another choice.
AP It must take a lot of energy keeping it going right through to the last door knob? What seems to me different about this building is, I know it was built into the Capital Lottery Awards that artists take a part in a building project without specifying to clearly how that will come about. But in this building you have actually got a fine artist, Richard Wentworth, working with a landscape artist and yourselves on the public square, which might traditionally be perceived as your area? How has that been?
P.St.J We have had a really great time with Richard Wentworth, and he, right from the outset, made it clear that he wasn't interested in doing art for the space but he wanted to be involved, as we wanted to encourage the artist to be involved, directly with having the idea for the space. I think he was very brave in what he took on. It was always the intention of the Gallery that the artists should be chosen at the earliest possible stage and by involved directly in the design of the project. But having said that, the building itself was designed in competition, and also the fact that its an art gallery it didn't seemed right to have the artist involved in designing the building. We made a conscious decision that the setting of the building would be the territory for the public art project. We went through a series of interviews to choose an artist, in which the client and ourselves were involved and other artists. In the end there were two people we liked so much we just couldn't decide which one to choose, so we decided to chose both Catherine Yass and Richard Wentworth. It has worked out well that Catherine, who wanted to work with photographic media and video, is doing a project in the project space window which faces out onto the square, and that Richard is the lead designer of the square itself. In terms of the overall experience it has been extremely difficult, I think, for Richard, maybe frustrating, because of the extended time period, and distance that a sculpture must feel from the physical realisation of something as big as this project. If you aren't able to quickly manifest something with your hands or get there even within a month - you have an idea, you may have quite a particular idea, but actually being able to smell it and feel it might take you an incredible amount of time. So that's been hard work.
AC Its been interesting. We are really interested in contemporary art - we are more interested in contemporary art than contemporary architecture sometimes. When we were making a short list of who would be interviewed for this major art collaboration in the building, Peter Jenkinson made lists and we made a list and there was lots of overlap. So whereas in other buildings I think its a kind of conflict waiting to happen, because the architects are very precious about what they're doing and not really that interested in the artist. And as Richard Wentworth has said there's a lot of good public art being done in the wrong place, and that's for sure the case. And why should artists be all of a sudden working at a scale, or using processes that a lot of them have never used or maybe never wanted to use? In a way our situation was slightly like that, but for us to talk to Richard and Catherine is really interesting because we really like their work. Richard's work is a big influence on us and to spend all this time with him is very enjoyable, and it has been frustrating but I think in the end it will be successful. Because in our view our the building is so big and we have worked on it in such an intense manner. We are quite fastidious that what our project has in it will be realised. That's what will be realised and we are brutal about achieving that. So we were actually quite relaxed about this idea that the public space is for someone else to come up with. In the end I think the artists have required more support from us than maybe we thought they would, but it completely makes sense that they did. It was a bigger mind blowing experience than we had appreciated, but I think that will be really good.
And we have tried to encourage this idea of lots of things contributing to the constitution of the public space and the feeling of the building in the town. And so we were responsible for the pub which is across the space from the Gallery. We were very busy when we got that commission and so rather than make our office bigger and us design the building and produce it in our office we collaborated with friends of ours, who did the lions share of that project. It doesn't look anything like the gallery - its like this big black lump of 'stuff' that's sitting on what will be the Gallery square. But there are things that are connected to the gallery and conceptually there is a big connection because Sergison Bates, the people we with collaborated on the design, are people we have known for a long time and have talked a lot about architecture with. But the diversity and the fact that it doesn't match that was something that actively we were encouraging. And the surface of the public space is another thing and the BHS and the Woolworth's which, from a cool critical eye are not brilliant buildings, but at the end of the day the project will be better for having them there. Because the front doors of BHS and Woolworth's and the pub and the front door of the Gallery are all visible from the entrance of the public space and that's an interesting mix. Its a lot more interesting than the entrances of four art galleries or an art gallery and a natural history museum and the idea of a cultural ghetto. So much contemporary art is about the kind of frisson and the overlap between high and low and artists appropriating the media of advertising and popular culture. And that's an important way in which the gallery can engage with the town. Its an important way in which we can say OK this building is big, its a bit taller than we would normally do, but at least our influence seems to disappear beyond the external face of the facade.
P.St.J Richard's idea was that the surface of the square should appear to, as it were, come from the building, so it spills out of the foyer of the building. Its an asphalt surface, the exact mix of which is taking us years to decide.
AP Why?
P.St.J Well, it hasn't been done before - (AC) and there's a lot of choice. One of the ideas is that the surface of the square should have a stripe to it, the exact alignment of which is perpendicular to the line of the building and the canal - so that the geometry of the surface of the square is on the geometry of the building which is a square. That has the effect of very directly linking the pattern of the ground to the gallery which is centred in the space and of displacing the other buildings around and of catching them slightly off guard, making you feel slightly floating. And also the pleasure of walking across a surface like that - that you are much more conscious of your direction and the contour and of stepping and walking on a stripped surface. It is something you can look down on from the windows of the gallery because a lot of the windows are quite pleasurable to stand at and gaze out of and watch the world go by - they are like stops in your experience of walking around the building. So he had a very clear idea that that arrangement of the surface, and of its lighting, would be the subject of his work, and we have been supporting him. But it does make you realise in the year and a half we have been developing that project how little time realising a building or a landscape is actually involved in the designing of it. Its quite amazing. 90% of our time is to do with organisation.
AC Administrating the contract. Its quite surreal and its still a year until August.
AP Because this is the biggest building...
AC Yes, that we've done, sure. Its happening incredibly fast. We won the competition in October 1995 and we were appointed two weeks later and we went out to tender a year after we were appointed. And lots of projects like this take five years to get on site. This one went a bit too quickly even, but at the end of the day for us that's good that it went quickly. But it takes real patience and its quite a strain, but you have to do it, building takes a long time.
P.St.J It’s a strain but its also a real pleasure. We are not unaware how amazing an opportunity this project has been, and for a small office to have a project of this nature is all you could ask for really.
AP Its undoubtedly built to last. The guys who were putting in the reinforcement claimed that they hadn’t put that much steel in a building since the 70’s. And God help the person who wanted to knock it down.
AC The steel doesn't actually make it last any longer. It's to do with how hard the structure is working. Yes, there is a lot of 'stuff' in the building - it’s a pretty heavy building, very stable and its not going to go anywhere.
P.St.J One of the spatial decisions we made was that the entrance of the building, which is on the corner of the highest part of the building and faces towards the top of Park Street, the point at which you come into the square, should be the largest cantilever we could achieve in order to make the foyer of the building have a really good connection to the public square. So a lot of that steel, some of it at least, is holding the building back from toppling over at that particular point.
AC You see you have all these loads and they can't get into the ground because we have taken away the building, under the heaviest part of the building. So the foundations, rather than bearing the weight of the building, mostly are stopping the building from tipping over. So there are like 85 ground anchors underneath the basement slab. It’s not completely logical but its going to have this really powerful connection to the outside space and it will have a big covered space before you go in. Its generous. Its a public building - it should be generous. I mean x number of people go into the building but lots of people go past it and if its pissing with rain you can step under the cantilever and wait for the rain to stop or go for a coffee or into the book shop. But it has to work in that way too - good public buildings do. I go to lots of galleries and probably half the time I go to a gallery I go and see two things and then go and have a coffee or go to the bookshop and there's nothing wrong with that. That's part of the role that they play. It's no longer justified to have them as vaults for precious objects. They have to be more than that and that's good because the public realm is under so much threat that these public building actually have to be firing on lots of cylinders. Especially in Walsall. Like going to the library or to the art gallery, going to the Town Hall - how many big spaces are accessible or exist? Its important and it's free, the gallery - and that's the big difference between free and paying. I can afford to go to a gallery but I won't pay if I just want to go and look at one thing and go to the book shop. It makes a big difference.
AP It's a beautiful space but you did have to take that cantilever as far as you could? Is that about the way you work?
AC No. No it was the other way around. We designed the cantilever and then the first thing the engineer said was ‘you don't mind if we put a column here to reduce it?’.
We don't work that way. We are not at all interested in structural exhibitionism. We work spatially and so we designed that entrance space and then the engineer said can you put a column here to break the cantilever slightly. We seriously looked at it and we said ‘no we can't, because this is the entrance of the building, that piece of structure will be so significant, that we don't know what to do with it - it will be too significant’. So either we can do the cantilever or we will have to redesign the entrance. We found other places where they could put some structure, the side of the Window Box is taking load now and we redesigned the cores. So we found more wall to either side of the cantilever and we had discussions about, ‘well OK, it is a big cantilever, but look we have a 30m wall above it - can't that wall be designed in order to span’. The funny thing about structural calculations is the structure kind of works or doesn't work, but then you have to prove that it works. And if you use conventional calculations it wouldn't work, so they had to find other ways of calculating the building. So one thing they had to do was three dimensional stress models rather than two dimensional, which is how it usually works. Because, clearly, stresses would go around the corner and the span would be working around the corner. So they built a three dimensional structural model on the computer and then loaded it and then you have all this diagonal reinforcement which was helping and it was possible to do. It was a spatially driven thing, and when you are there I don't think your mouth will drop and you'll say ‘Oh, what a huge cantilever’. Its the sort of thing that will dawn on you, slowly, but its about making this connection. It does look like its sitting on the Window Box - it just structurally couldn't do that as much as we would like. I think it will be quite a latent experience, the cantilever. Its just that that structure at the entrance - its significance was kind of too much.
P.St.J In that instance we thought the cantilever and the gesture that allowed the lobby to make to the square was really important. We make a lot of models - our office is piled up with models which are not generally for presentation to clients. They are our working models. Everyone in the office makes them - we make them as well and we design spaces using these models and talking and sketching. One of the really amazing things about working on this project has been - because of the amazing variety of types of spaces that have been needed and then this choice of constructional systems, basically a wall system - has been this amazingly extended spatial experience, potentially, of wandering through the building. But there are many, many local situations of a staircase, a window, a big space next to a small space, which should mean that - the cantilever is perhaps one of the most dramatic events along that walking path - which should mean that walking through the building isn't a gob-smacking experience but a real pleasure.
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