The Observer | 01. 1 0. 17 | THE NEW REVIEW 27
Where there’s art, let there be light
Th e new Tate St Ives extension is more than just a white space – though to appreciate it fully you’ll need to go out for a swim
It looks at fi rst sight like an awful lot
of trouble for a room. Twelve years
or more and £20m in the making,
with chunks of granite hacked out of
a cliff and homes relocated to make it
possible, most of what the public will
see of the expansion of Tate St Ives is
a single large gallery. If you want to
admire the exterior you have to walk
out on the beach at low tide, or swim
if it is high, to catch a view of one of its
main aspects.
There is more to it than that,
however. There is the back-of-house
stuff – offi ces, art preparation facilities,
a big shiny art handling lift – that the
public mostly won’t see but which
transform the workings of the gallery.
There are improvements to Tate St
Ives’s original 1993 building. New
landscaped terraces formed on the
roofs of the extension ease the steep
public route down from the top of the
cliff to the beach. Most importantly, the
new gallery is not any old exhibition
space but one that contains about as
much intelligence, strength of mind
and sensitivity as it is possible to put
into a single plain rectangle. It is only a
room, as Cézanne didn’t exactly say of
Monet, but what a room.
The origin of Tate St Ives is in the
artists who have been coming to the
Cornish town since the 19th century,
attracted by its remoteness and peace,
its cheap spaces, its physical beauty
and its clear, changeable, cool, light.
Most famously, before and after the
second world war it attracted British
modernists such as Ben Nicholson,
Christopher Wood, Peter Lanyon,
Roger Hilton, Patrick Heron and
Barbara Hepworth, whose studio and
sculpture garden are now among the
sights of the town. By the 1980s it was
decided that it would be good to build
on this history by creating a gallery
of modern art, and a deal was done
between Cornwall county council and
the Tate Gallery whereby a museum
would be built to show the work of
these and related artists.
A building was designed by Eldred
Evans and David Shalev , architects
whose style developed from a singular
and skilful version of brutalism, to
something at the less garish end of
postmodernism, to more traditionalist
designs that were championed by
Prince Charles.
Tate St Ives comes from the
middle of these phases. Its plan
owes something to James Stirling’s
Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, one of the
most momentous buildings of the
1980s, in which a public route winds
up through the building, and in and
around a central rotunda. Tate St Ives
does the same, on a more precipitous
slope than in Stuttgart but with a
white-beige palette more muted
than the pinks, greens, browns and
primaries that Stirling used.
The Cornish building is a frustrating
one. It has generosity and glimmers
of magnifi cence, and some deft
manoeuvres in the sequence of rooms
that climb up the cliff. Its centrepiece,
the open but sheltering rotunda, is
almost beautiful.
I’m told the building is popular
with local residents. But it is let down
by perverse circulation – you have
to go up, at one point, to go down,
to go up again – and cranky details.
The exhibition spaces, the building’s
raison d’etre, feel almost like an
afterthought, out of balance with the
elaborate array of passages, vestibules
and stairs you use to reach them. Itfeels like a complicated way to get to
not very much.
The main reason for the expansion,
which was conceived early in the
millennium, is a desire to enlarge
and enhance the exhibition space, in
particular to accommodate exhibitions
of contemporary art. Until now
it could house such a temporary
exhibition, or a display of St Ives
artists from Tate’s collections, but not
both, which annoyed people who had
travelled to see one or the other. It had
to be closed for six weeks a year while
shows were changed over. It needed
better education spaces, now a sine
qua non of public museums. Tate St
Ives wanted to build on both the rising
popularity of contemporary art and
its success in attracting visitors and
boosting the local economy.
All of which was sane and
reasonable, as was an exemplary 2005
competition that chose Jamie Fobert ,
a Canadian-born graduate of David
Chipperfi eld’s offi ce. The only snag
was that they wanted to build on a
car park which, in the close-packed
town of St Ives, was considereda more precious asset than an art
gallery, which caused intense local
opposition, which caused Tate St Ives
to back down, requiring a new site
to be formed by demolishing some
postwar houses and rebuilding them
nearby at greater density. Under EU
rules the change of site meant a new
competition had to be held, which
Fobert won again.
Which brings us, by a more
roundabout route than anyone
would have wanted, but which the
positive-thinking Fobert says brought
advantages, such as time to think
and an ultimately better site, to that
room. It consists of 500 column-
free square metres which can be
experienced as a single space, as it will
be for the opening exhibition of the
sculptor Rebecca Warren , or divided
multiple ways into smaller rooms. It
sits at the end of an enfi lade of Evans
and Shalev’s galleries, comfortably
so despite a marked diff erence in
architectural style.
The gallery’s distinguishing feature
is a deep, layered ceiling in which
six angled roof lights, each the size
of a living room, stand above a rank
of concrete beams meaty enough
to carry Richard Serras and Henry
Moores or, as Tate likes to tell you,
elephants and double decker buses.
Satisfying and intriguing as it is, it has
a larger purpose, which is to manage
and fi lter daylight such that it falls in
bright, lively areas on the fl oors, whereArchitecture
sensitive artworks won’t be placed,
while the walls are washed in the more
muted light demanded by standards
for the conservation of paintings.
The design is, according to Fobert,
“led by daylight, by using daylight
as a material. It would be ridiculous
to build a gallery in St Ives without
daylight.” Of course, but the problem
with many art spaces is that this
precious luminance is so managed
and processed in the interests of
conservation that it might as well be
artifi cial. Or else curators draw the
blinds and turn on the lights anyway,
because it’s easier. Here, working with
the environmental engineers Max
Fordham , Fobert has striven to make
a place where you properly sense
the outside. There is a high degree of
tuning that few visitors will notice
but is crucial to its success, such as
the placing of the roof lights over
the beams in ways that soften harsh
confl icts of light and shade.
To describe the gallery as having
white walls and concrete fl oors and
ceiling doesn’t say much – if the I nuit
are said to have dozens of words for
snow, one of the small challenges of
being a contemporary architecture
critic is fi nding at least as many ways
of telling one white cube from another.
But the qualities of light and the
substance of the superstructure give
the room a presence, a sense of being
made and habitable, that set it apart
from those galleries where the rules
and regulations of displaying art are
allowed to suck out their life.
It has other qualities. It provides a
moment of repose and spaciousness
in the warren-like town of St Ives and
in the also warren-like Evans and
Shalev’s building, without feeling
alien to either – the older architects,
who still live in the town, were invited
back to make changes within the
boundaries of their own building.
It redresses the former imbalance
between display and circulation. It
successfully aims, largely by avoiding
slickness, to belong to St Ives, while
also being part of the international
circuit of contemporary art spaces.
In the end, though, the ultimate
object of all that eff ort and money is
not even the room, but the light it helps
to make. Which may sound frivolous,
but if the idea is to show art in the
best possible way, couldn’t be more
important.Th e extension provides
a moment of repose
and spaciousness in
the warren-like town
of St Ives
Jamie Fobert’s Tate St Ives extension close up, above, and, below right, the view from the sea, showing it above the original building. Below left, the light-filtering concrete beams of the interior. Hufton+Crow, Alamy, Dennis Gilbert
Tate St Ives extension
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