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	Walsall Art Gallery and Public Square
	The new Walsall Art Gallery will be a home for the Garman Ryan Collection, donated to the town by Kathleen Garman, Lady Epstein. The 4500 sq m building will also provide world class galleries for an ambitious temporary exhibition programme of contemporary art, extensive education facilities, conference rooms, restaurant and a shop. The accommodation is provided within a tower that will give an appropriate prominence to this very public building and a point of orientation within the town.
	The tower form of the art gallery makes possible a series of connected floor plates, where each major part of the programme can be accommodated on its own floor. This allows the height, the structure, the lighting and the services to be tailored to each kind of space. The relatively small size and particular character of each floor ensures that the exterior is never far away, and that there is always a strong sense of where you are. All the spaces of the building are side-lit. The Garman Ryan suite has windows that give a domestic scale to the galleries appropriate to the scale of the works of the collection. The exhibition galleries have more flexible clerestory lighting. The primary vertical circulation for the building is provided by two 16 person lifts giving fast access to all public areas of the building. In addition a variety of interconnecting accommodation stairs provide internal connections within gallery suites and between adjacent parts of the building.
	A major part of the project is the design of a new public space at the centre of Walsall. This new place is loosely defined by a collection of buildings and infrastructures, all having their own scale and character. The lead consultants for the design of the space are artists Catherine Yass and Richard Wentworth.
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