Athfield Architects: Adam Art Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand, 1999
Project type
The art gallery located on the Kelburn campus of Victoria University in Wellington is built on the space remaining between three university buildings of different ages: the Old Kirk Building, the Hunter Building and the Student Union Building.
The gallery was completed in September of 1999 to mark the Queen Victoria centennial; it measures 330 square metres and houses a great variety of continually changing collections.
The site chosen for the Adam Art Gallery is the Culliford staircase, built in the mid-sixties to a plan by Ian Reynolds: it was intended to connect various campus buildings, but was later abandoned for safety reasons.
When the faculty of art history moved into the nearby Old Kirk Building, it was proposed that the staircase could be incorporated into a new exhibition space.
Victoria University held a competition for the design of the gallery in 1996, inviting three New Zealand architectural practices to participate: Architectus, Pete Bossley and Athfield Architects.
The panel of assessors, which included Jenny Harper, head of the department of art history, Paul Walker, architectural historian, and David Mitchell, the architect who designed the City Gallery in Auckland, chose Ian Athfield's proposal.
The geometry of the building is a product of the complex shape of the site, determined by the existing staircase and the alignment of adjacent buildings; the entrance is located on the perimeter of the adjacent University Union Memorial Theatre, the theatre in the student's centre.
The stairway is not only the point of origin of the gallery, but also its main display space, and determines its final architectural form.
The visitor passes through the entrance into a glassed-in area housing the Sculpture Gallery, which has come to symbolise the building as a whole.
Continuing into the building, the visitor enters a large atrium with a ticket office; the most valuable item in the university's collection, a painting by Colin McCahon called "Gate III", is hung on the wall bordering on the theatre. A little further on, the deep, straight volume of the temporary exhibition space opens up on the right, 14 metres high and illuminated by two thin continuous panels of glass which separate the southern wall from the rest of the volume.
The dizzying two-storey high space adjacent to the staircase rises directly above the dressing rooms of the Memorial Theatre; it is designed as a "lightweight" steel structure containing all the ventilation and climate control equipment.
On the outside this volume is entirely zinc plated, so that from a distance it looks like a huge "black box" resting on top of the existing cement building.
This gives the building an imposing elegance which perfectly suits its role as a cultural centre.
The two lower levels are accessible from the outside by means of two freight lifts in the space connecting the building's two main axes; additional display spaces follow, some of them lit through the empty volume of the staircase and through gaps in the atrium floor.
Clear glass windows offer people outside glimpses of the exhibitions and attract them into the building.
Adam Art Gallery is more than just an exhibition space: it is a place of interaction between students and professors, using material from the collections for didactic purposes.
Floriana De Rosa
Link:
http://www2.vuw.ac.nz/adamartgal/
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