Landscape Architecture: Landscape Architecture: - School of ...

7 6 7
5
4
1
2 3
1 Exhibition space
2 Courtyard café
3 Storage
4 First-floor open-plan space
5 Second-floor open-plan space
6 Skylight
7 Roof-level plant enclosure
Cross-section. A long, thin lantern runs down the centre
of the top floor. On the right, adjoining the ground-floor
gallery, is the courtyard café.
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8
6
4
8 9
7
5
1
2
3
1 Entrance lobby
2 Exhibition space
3 Meeting room
4 First-floor open-plan space
5 Offices
6 Second-floor open-plan space
7 Second-floor offices
8 Skylight
9 Roof-level plant enclosure
Long section. Though similar in plan, the three levels of
gallery space have different characters, lighting
conditions and ceiling heights.
and not open to the public. The Blouin Institute, though
entirely privately funded, is open to the public and not a
commercial venture, and so adds a new dimension both to the
character of the immediate area and to the possibilities for
presenting art in London.
The institute draws both on the area’s building stock and
its changing character. Dating from the 1920s, the building
originally housed a coachbuilder for luxury cars, but was
converted into studios, workshops and offices in the 1980s in
a way that compromised its utilitarian qualities, which are
often appropriate for contemporary arts venues. Covering
about 3,250 square metres (34,983 square feet) over three
floors, enough of the original character remained, however,
for Louise Blouin MacBain to spot its potential as a
permanent London location for her art foundation when she
saw it in 2004. She turned to Borgos Dance, who had
designed several stands at international art fairs for her, to
design the conversion.
As Simon Dance explains, the aim was not just to re-create
the old coachbuilding workshops where Rolls-Royces, Bentleys
and Daimlers were turned out to the specification of rich buyers,
but also to intensify the buildings’s essential character. On the
outside the designers not only cleaned up the London stock
brick facades, but also rationalised the openings, eliminating
both later alterations and the abnormalities that practicality
may have rendered necessary. A significant number of piers and
arched windows were rebuilt, all in load-bearing masonry. The
implication of an industrial building pared down to its essence
and then transformed into ‘what it really wants to be’, as Louis
Kahn might have said, is made explicit in the permanent
lighting installation designed with James Turrell. This highlights
the windows at night, turning the building into a beacon that
the BBC executives can see from their Television Centre
fortress across a cityscape that includes the motorway linking
Shepherd’s Bush with the Westway, the vast new White City
shopping centre and a site on which Rem Koolhaas has designs.
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