The Foundation Centre
In February 2006, the Foundation moved from its existing offices in the Founders' house to its own purpose built Foundation Centre within the woodland of the sculpture estate. The building was designed by Studio Downie Architects.
The Foundation Centre is the second building that Studio Downie Architects have worked on with the Cass Sculpture Foundation, having designed the Foundation's Visitor Gallery at Goodwood in 1994. The new Foundation Centre will enable the Foundation to give a much larger audience access to the unique and rapidly growing educational archive charting the development of twenty-first century British sculpure.
The new 500m2 Foundation Centre provides the focus for the Foundation's goals to enable the future of 21st century British sculpture today. Its main purpose is to house the charity's unique and fast growing 21st century British Sculpture archive and library. The archive (pictured) houses an extensive and continually growing collection of artists' drawings, maquettes, videos, and other source material. The library stretches the length of the administration office and is an important resource of the works of today's sculptors, both electronically and in book form. The main space will be used for lectures, symposiums and conferences and is available for special event hire.
Inspiration for the Foundation Centre building came from the beautiful sylvan setting of the copse, to weave the new within the sensitive landscape. To respond to the randomness and verticality of the screens of trees, new flat simple planes reflect the surrounding landscape and changing light and shadows. A series of basic wood fins are hung from the facades as a continuum of the tree trunks opposite. When viewed through the shadowy copse, these dark vertical elements become at one, blending between the trees.
The new Foundation Centre responds to the lines of the landscape within a triangular piece of land, a trapezoidal form is set down low into a small valley with a sedum planted roof. This forms a visual extension of the surrounding grass and with concrete fingers stretching into the chalk slopes, interlocks existing and new.
This lower element is also designed to conceal, enveloping the largest volume within the building, a 7-metre high display space, which partly protrudes through the sedum, reflecting the scale and material of Studio Downie's earlier visitor gallery in Goodwood.
Greys and whites refer to the indigenous flint and provide a starkness between inside and out, hard and soft. The calm, robust interior of exposed white concrete and blockwork walls contrast with the softness and changing spectrum of the outside landscape. Unlike their earlier visitor gallery where boundaries were blurred with a flow between inside and out, here there is clear separation with the fins linking to the copse.
view and download high resolution images of the Foundation Centre
About Studio Downie Architects
Studio Downie Architects' other notable projects include the recently completed Royal Geographical Society Exhibition and Study Centre, London which in November 2005, won the British Construction Awards Judges Special Award for an inspirational building; the refurbishment of the Royal Geographical Society's Ondaatje Theatre, London and the refurbishment of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. Current projects include and extension to the Lyme Regis Museum, the library for the Royal College of Surgeons of England, and proposals within the new King's Cross Central development.
Photography by Peter Cook and Anthony Coleman
