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A new art gallery conversion is a lesson in how to revitalise Spitalfields — the ugly block next door shows how not to...
What would London be without Spitalfields, that ever-bubbling pot of poverty and wealth, of immigrants and emigrants, of aspiration, struggle, religion and murder? It satisfies our novelistic sense of what a city should be, our appetite for dankness, disturbance, and for rare blooms rising from rubble, even as most of London is more smooth and normal.
It remains an emblem of fetid urbanity despite 30 years of gentrification led by enthusiasts for its fine old Georgian houses, and the more recent descent of the City lawyers Allen and Overy in a Foster-designed glass box over its old market. Despite, too, the colonisation by artists and fashionistas.
So it is no surprise that it should be the place where the extremes of modern London architecture meet. Feet apart, back-to-back across the quaintly named Frying Pan Alley, is a new gallery of delicate sensibility designed by a group of young architects called 6a, and a 33-storey hulk of student housing created by the 88-year-old practice TP Bennett Architects.
The gallery is called Raven Row, after the old name of the street it fronts, now named Artillery Lane. It is a free-to-enter, not-for-profit art centre, which is “led by a desire to show the most interesting work that has somehow escaped London's attention”. Its first show, which opens on 28 February, will set the pattern of unearthing buried gems with an exhibition of the work of Ray Johnson (no, I hadn't heard of him either, but he is a pop artist dubbed in the Sixties “New York's most famous unknown artist”).
The founder, funder and eventual director of the gallery is Alex Sainsbury, who has been collecting art for 15 years. He is keen to stress that he is not heir to the supermarket chain that bears his name, but some fraction of its wealth has come his way, which like others in his family has helped him to be a judicious patron of art and architecture. He has previously commissioned a house in Chelsea — to the delight of critics and the dismay of more conservative neighbours — from Tony Fretton, architect of the Lisson Gallery and more recently Anish Kapoor's house.
Raven Row occupies two linked houses, impregnated with Spitalfields' history. Built in the late 17th century, in the 18th century they became the shops, offices and homes of silk-trading Huguenot refugees from France. This was a time when Spitalfields aspired to rival Bond Street for elegance, and succeeded. From this period there survives what is now the finest 18th- century shopfront in London, a Doric-columned, bow-windowed construction painted to look like stone.
The Spitalfields silk business then fell on hard times, and the past 200 years have been less kind to the two houses. A greengrocer moved in. In the 1920s a panelled interior was stripped out and shipped to the Art Institute of Chicago. In the 1950s and again in the 1970s, they were ravaged by fire. Most recently they housed an insurance company.
This history, like the history of the whole area, is one of silk, brick, wood and iron, and of rot and scorching, and it has inspired the transformation into an art gallery. Rather than create an imaginary Georgian perfection, the architects have restored the best of the old work alongside a patched and mottled concrete floor installed after the 1970s fire and relics of 19th-century changes.
The two main gallery spaces are new, adjoining the rear of the old houses, and are variants on the white cube theme: well-proportioned, deferential to the art they will contain, one top-lit, the other side-lit. But they are floored in reclaimed Baltic pine, 200 years old, and reached by a flight of concrete steps that achieve exceptional lightness by adapting the skills of Georgian builders. Different eras, expressed in the concrete, pine, panelling and stairs, and in both materials and techniques, continuously overlap.
Upstairs, the panelled room that went to Chicago has returned: having been repatriated by conservationists in the 1980s, it has spent a quarter-century in storage in Essex, awaiting this moment. It rejoins enfilades of classical, brightly lit rooms, now painted in subtle degrees of off-white, with contemporary light fittings and bronze door handles pleasingly indented to receive the grip of your thumb. These rooms will be used both as offices and occasional gallery spaces.
“It's a bit Pompeii,” says architect Tom Emerson of these layers of time. “We were concerned with all the stories of the place, not just those you would call Heritage with a capital H.”
Emerson and his partner Stephanie Macdonald are the principals of 6a, a young practice for whom Raven Row is the best chance yet to demonstrate their architecture of light touches. Believing that art should be the centre of visual attention in an art gallery, they bring the rich history of the place to life unobstrusively, and as much through things you can touch as see, such as the rough and smooth surfaces of bronze balustrades and some cast iron cladding to the rear of the building. Their design is “tactile more than visual”.
And then there is the student housing, still under construction next door. It is the creation of Nido, a company which cannily spotted the profitable potential of charging students between £200 and £300 a week for a smallish room. It's recession-proof, and now helped by the weak pound, as many of the students are from overseas. Student housing was also excused from the requirement under Ken Livingstone of providing affordable housing in new residential developments.
Nido, which has one development up and running in King's Cross, offers its students a protected community in a big, strange city, complete with bars and pool tables, all of which is smart and good. Nido also has aspirations to style, having employed Tyler Brûlé, the creator of Wallpaper magazine, as its design guru. Under his guidance it has come up with some whizzy graphics and a particular taste in contemporary furniture.
This stylishness does not extend to the building's still incomplete exterior. Its sheer size — more than 1,000 rooms — makes it oppressive, and will not be improved by the metallic cladding, in a greyish-bluish-brownish irregular chequerboard that will wrap its full height. This cladding has a resemblance to that used by Nido in King's Cross, which was designed by other architects. But there it was devised as a way of cladding existing office buildings which were made into student residences. In Spitalfields, where the building is completely new, it makes less sense and is likely to look monotonous.
Dramatic shifts in scale are part of the stuff of cities, but it takes brilliance to pull them off, which the design of Nido's lacks. It sits in its surroundings, robotic and dull. TP Bennett argues that the surface will shimmer and that it will become “crystalline” at the top, with the help of some glass fins applied to its exterior. But the cladding that is already there doesn't shimmer and it is hard to imagine that it will improve by being spread over 30 storeys.
Of course, the comparison of Raven Row and Nido is unequal. One is the labour of love of a man who is not looking to turn a profit (although, at £1.8 million, it is not extravagant). The other is a commercial proposition. But if a fraction of the sensitivity that went into the gallery could go into projects like the Nido tower, London would be a better place.
The mystery is why planners allowed the tower. Raven Row, which includes a Grade I listed building, was minutely scrutinised and discussed by the local authority, down to the colour of paint and the choice of lettering on the front. If any such discussions were held about the larger, more impactful tower, there is little evidence of it.
Raven Row is at 56 Artillery Lane, E1 (020 7377 4300, www.ravenrow.org) and will be open Wed-Sun, 11am-6pm from 28 February.
Reader views (1)
This is the first article to acknowledge the loss of the architectural legacy of Spitalfields, which has been a distinct safe haven from the City directly because of poverty. But urban planners led by the City friendly Mayors of London have failed Londoners when compared to our continental friends in France and Italy. Spain is only beginning to realise how much one can lose to accommodate wealthy Social Area Climbers (SACs) who latch on to areas because of cultural kudos but destroy what is and was good forever. Tower Hamlets Council has done more to allow negative development. This includes allowing Allen & Overy Spitalfields development to have air vents giving out disgusting restaurant smells to pedestrians while the rich and wealthy solicitors have a smell-free green roof garden and an energy efficient building paid for by local energy funds. The whole development is a joke including the art work and the canopy which exposes rather than shields users from the worst of extreme weather. The magnificent vista and walkway to Christchurch only remains as a result of the efforts of local campaigners who rejected claims by the SDG that the view could not be maintained. The City scapes are aimed at the homogenous US shopping mall types. For all of this, there can be no greater accolade than City public spaces such as Spitalfields being designated as one of the worst examples by the PPS group, which is responsible for urban successes such as the Rockerfeller centre.
- Ms B K, London UK, 14/02/2009 11:17
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