A catalogue of agricultural shed components might not be the first thing that most architects would reach for when charged with designing a contemporary art gallery in London, but then most of them don’t think like the young collective Assemble. Hearing two of its members enthuse about the limitless possibilities offered by a brochure of fibre-cement sheeting, you get a taste of the combination of poetry and pragmatism behind their new £4.2m home for Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art.
“It is a very cheap material,” says Adam Willis, who led the project with Paloma Strelitz, pointing to the corrugated boards that they have used to clad part of the building. “But it also has this special handmade quality, and it comes in an amazing range of profiled ridges and flashing details.” The architects have reworked this off-the-peg kit of parts, usually used for barn rooftops, to form a carefully panelled facade, each element hand-stained a watery bluish grey in their studio workshop to elevate it above the farmyard norm.
It is an inventive fusion of the industrial and the crafted that runs throughout the project, which has seen the boiler house and laundry rooms of a Victorian bath house in New Cross, south London, transformed into a beguiling new gallery complex for Goldsmiths’ art college. It is the first substantial permanent building by the Turner prize-winning collective, and it fulfils all the promise of their fleeting temporary structures – and more.
Turner fame was a long way off when Assemble won the competition to design the building in 2014, with little more than a couple of pop-up cinemas to their name. The loose competition brief focused on creating access to the distinctive cast-iron water tanks that sit atop the brick building, which stands as a demure neighbour to Will Alsop’s ebullient visual arts faculty, a big glass box crowned with a metallic scribble. But Assemble saw the potential to open up more of the labyrinthine complex with a series of strategic cuts and insertions. They threw everything at it, building a huge doll’s house model that prised open to reveal a cross-section through their proposed galleries, complete with tiny installations in situ, which wowed the judges and helped them beat off competition from established gallery specialists including Jamie Fobert, 6a and Tate Modern architect Harry Gugger.
It was a brave choice from Goldsmiths, but the risk has paid off. The resulting project feels excavated as much as made, a series of spaces that have been discovered and their special qualities amplified, along with a pair of crisp top-lit white cube galleries as a foil to the industrial grit. It is light-touch in some places, meticulously refined in others.
The defining move is made in the centre of the building, where a great chunk of the ground floor has been chopped out to create a deep double-height project space that plunges into the basement. It is first encountered in a theatrical moment, from a series of Juliet balconies at ground level, some framed in existing openings, some sliced through the brickwork. The internal walls have been left as a raw record of the building, like a geological section cut through the ground, revealing sedimentary layers of patched masonry, glazed white bricks, old oak lintels and the sawn-off ends of iron beams, descending to meet a series of atmospheric basement galleries below.
“We wanted to make the variety and idiosyncrasy of the existing spaces their defining feature,” says Strelitz, “and contrast them with two new galleries that could offer different qualities of light.” The new rooms have been inserted as lightweight steel-framed boxes, lined with white walls and oak floors, one lit by clearstory windows, the other by a central lantern, providing neutral space either side of the brooding water tanks, whose dark, rusty heft has been left exposed. Walk though a door in the tank and you find that half the roof has been removed, creating a surreal sculpture terrace, framed by the riveted iron panels. In a similar moment of delight, the staircase that leads here takes you past a big window on the landing that offers a glimpse into the old swimming pool hall, converted to airy painting studios in the 1990s, providing a view into the working life of the art school.
Throughout, there are details that show the architects’ interest in how the building has been made and altered over time, and an awareness that their interventions are part of the ongoing life of the place, forming a richly layered canvas for artists to add to in turn. Sections of great sausage-like water pipes, which bulge from the ceiling with Heath Robinson glee, have been coated with a deep blue micaceous paint, used on German railways, giving them a sparkly sheen. Cast-iron beams in the ceiling of one room have been painted gold and the patchy edges of cement repairs to an old stone staircase highlighted in white, rather than smoothed over. A big shop window at ground level will one day face on to a new plaza, when a cluster of 1960s prefabs are eventually removed.
Much of the magic derives from the unorthodox way that the 17-strong practice operates, making many of the components themselves through their construction company, Assemble Builders. They have cast beautiful, glossy salmon-pink cement panels for the reception desk and cafe counter, ridged to echo the corrugated cladding, and made blue marbled tiles for the splashbacks in the loos. Revealing an obsessive level of care, they also developed their own rusty brown timber stain for the ceiling in the tanks, by dissolving wire wool in vinegar. Granby Workshop, part of the project they initiated in Liverpool for which they won the Turner prize, has produced a series of bone china lampshades for the cafe, sponged with speckles of brick aggregate, while Assemble even designed the cafe chairs. Paper-thin sheets of steel have been crimped, riveted and chemically passivated to give them a golden rainbow glow, like soap bubbles on legs. They have a comfy spring to them too.
The bricolage quality of the building has been cranked up a notch for the opening show with the choice of Mika Rottenberg, a New York-based Argentine artist who constructs immersive sets to show her absurdist video work. The whole place has been taken over by a series of false rooms, suspended ceilings, revolving partitions and dripping air conditioning units – as well as a twitching ponytail poking through a hole in a wall, as if one of the Assemblers got trapped, mid-construction.
“It’s a university gallery, so we’re trying to show different kinds of exhibition-making,” says CCA director Sarah McCrory. She says the next exhibitions will leave the galleries more open, with work by Estonian artist Kris Lemsalu and a posthumous show of works from the 1970s by radical feminist photographer Alexis Hunter. “There will be research and historical shows as well as new commissions,” she adds. “The programme is purposefully all over the place.”
Like the building, McCrory brings an inventive and slightly anarchic attitude to bear. In Assemble’s multilayered exhibition factory, she couldn’t have a better place to experiment.
- Goldsmiths CCA opens 8 September.
