BEYOND COMPARE

Two new art galleries – one fluid and dramatic Zaha, the other calm, contemplative Caruso St John – have certain things in common. And that includes the old question: does their art smother their content?

Words Hugh Pearman

­­It is customary to review buildings in isolation, even when they are typologically similar.  This sometimes seems a little perverse. For instance, Caruso St John’s Nottingham Contemporary opened almost simultaneously with Zaha Hadid’s Maxxi gallery in Rome, and many of the same critics visited both within a few days. Both are architecturally ambitious receiving-houses for art. True, Maxxi has a growing collection of its own in both art and architecture, but one senses that the temporary exhibitions will be the thing.  In this they are unlike traditional repositories for existing collections, such as Rick Mather’s Ashmolean extension, reviewed on page 40. Programmatically then, the new galleries of Rome and Nottingham have much in common. Yet in the coverage of the two buildings, there was almost no cross-reference to be found.  Why not?

Partly, I suspect, because here we are in the realm of the auteur architect.  We have been programmed to expect utter originality from both practices, and for that matter we expect them to be utterly different. And then, there is a difference of scale – both in size and in spend.  Maxxi (that strange British-Leyland-style name is in fact a kind of acronym, standing for Museum of Art for the 21st (XXI) century) cost some £133m, ten times as much as Nottingham. Zaha’s covers 21,200m2 of internal space plus a large landscaped public plaza, Caruso St John’s has 3,400m2 plus a small cafe terrace jammed up against a flyover. Yet each is designed to house both visual art and performance. Both glory in their high-quality concrete (predominantly precast and orthogonal in Nottingham, in-situ and sinuous in Rome).  Both are to an extent exercises in cultural regeneration.  For all the centrality of the Nottingham site, it was built on the line of an old semi-subterranean railway, while the Roman example, close to one of the 1960 Olympics sites (including Nervi’s Palazetto dello Sport) and to Renzo Piano’s recent concert hall complex, transforms an area of military barracks. Trams rumble and squeal past both. And, of course, both buildings act as landmarks.  It is a long time since we expected a new art gallery to be self-effacing.

I was one of those critics who visited the two buildings in short order. My first gut reactions: I was more impressed by Zaha in Rome than I expected to be, and at first disappointed by the appearance of the Nottingham Contemporary, which is as hermetic an affair as Zaha’s is visually open, and appears to turn its back on the city. For all the care Caruso St John has taken with its green and gold facade and lace-patterned precast units, the remark made by some passing students when I was there – to the effect that it looks like a stack of shipping containers – is unfortunately apt. This is exactly what it looks like at a glance, and other critics have made the same comparison. It’s understandable because the proportions of the tall, narrow scalloped panels are uncannily similar to the strengthening corrugations of a steel container. Being set right next to the new railway tracks of the city’s recently-built tramway route only adds to the industrial feel. But if this is the case then – to butcher the reported remark of Inigo Jones regarding his barn-like church in Covent Garden – then this is the finest stack of shipping containers in all England. (One also remembers Reyner Banham commending Jacobsen’s St Catherine’s College Oxford for looking like a motel – it did and it didn’t). First, an echo of industrialisation is intentional, for various reasons: Adam Caruso cites the found-space art galleries of genuine New York lofts, and I was reminded of the temporary home of the Museum of Modern Art in a former factory in Queen’s, while the mother MoMA was being rebuilt.  And secondly, the appearance of the building changes, the closer you get to it. This is the opposite of speed-read architecture. It’s high-resolution architecture to savour, to feel, in close-up.

What, then, of Zaha? If I went with low expectations, that was because her prodigious success in recent years has led to what at times seems like production-line parametricism – a method that, despite heavyweight intellectual underpinning, can seem just too glib, too predictable.  Maxxi – won in competition 10 years ago – is in contrast old-school Zaha, when she and her team (26 architects are credited for the competition, another 20 for the build-out) were still wrestling relatively conventional design and construction techniques into new forms, at a time when this large project was an immense vote of confidence.  Although her building is every bit as exuberant as we have come to expect – it delaminates, it snakes, it writhes, it is nonetheless carefully engineered to be earthquake-resistant – it is oddly enough relatively unobtrusive in its context. This is for the simple reason that it is set behind a retained and incorporated barracks building on the street line. Unlike the landlocked Nottingham Contemporary, however, it has the luxury of a large public plaza beside and behind it.  This, as is habitual with Hadid, becomes part of the overall composition. However, part of this very generous space is earmarked for a future phase of Maxxi, to be built by others.

The first thing you notice in both Rome and Nottingham is the quality of the concrete. They take and improve techniques familiar from the 1950s and 1960s: Caruso St John revisits textured and coloured precast concrete while Zaha aims for supersmooth shuttered concrete, more Tadao Ando than Oscar Niemeyer. Both largely succeed. In the case of Nottingham, the local presence of Trent Concrete – a pre-cast specialist that has worked with most of the best architects including Hopkins – has been a bonus.  Caruso St John is famously attentive to materiality and here it rejects the 1960s norm of boldly-moulded, aggregate-finished, panels, instead opting for an ultra-delicate surface finish closer to terracotta, derived from an original example of the machine-made Victorian lace that originated in this part of the city. These new ornamentalists are happy to look to the lessons of history, citing the likes of Louis Sullivan as happy to combine progressive architecture with decoration. And – close up – it works. It’s just a moulded lace pattern, but it actually looks like real lace.  Take a few steps back and it becomes a fuzz, the gilt highlights take over. This sudden coming into focus at pedestrian distance is a very charming effect.

In Rome, meanwhile, Zaha’s people have done what her old mentor Rem Koolhaas failed to do at his Casa da Musica in Porto - achieve long, high-quality concrete pours and largely do away with unsightly seams marking the join between one pour and the next (it helps that the earthquake engineering divides the building into large discrete chunks anyway, making a different kind of joint). Few among the general public will notice this detail, but it took a lot of research to get the mix, pale colour and smooth finish just right.  In contrast, the interior walls of shuttered concrete at the Nottingham Contemporary, for instance as encountered on the main stairway, are rough and inconsistent, one hopes intentionally. The raw industrial look is deemed important here, and offsets lovely details like the satin-smooth stainless-steel handrail, or the almost Rietveld-like colourful gloss-painted mdf of the cafe toilets.

I can’t give you a direct comparison on how the respective spaces function for art because at its opening Zaha’s building was empty – the first public shows will not be until the spring. But it did not need the acrobatic dance performance at the launch to suggest that these dynamic interiors, where circulation spaces merge with defined galleries at various levels, would work brilliantly for drama and dance across the piece, not just in the auditorium. The spaces, with insistently swerving ceiling blades of GRC-clad steel, sometimes leaning walls, and occasional large windows to the outside world, are all about fluidity and movement. They have been criticised for being inimical to visual art, as was Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim 50 years ago. It’s the old business of the container taking over from the contained. But what art are we talking about? The proof of the success or otherwise of these extraordinary interiors will surely be in the nature of the art they generate.  This building throws down the gauntlet.

They are however almost disturbingly busy spaces visually, in absolute contrast to the calm, reflective galleries provided by Caruso St John. While both sets of architects work hard to provide indirect top-lighting, the asymmetric coffered-ceiling effect in Nottingham is more successful in its own terms – which are to do with stasis, not movement. I like the way the same language is used, writ large, in Nottingham’s double-height gallery which boasts just a single, very large, coffer. It is like Zaha’s in one respect only: both provide large picture windows directly out of the gallery to the world outside. Zaha’s is like a viewing gallery, set on high: Caruso St John’s akin to a shop window, right on the street corner.

Maxxi is multi-level on the flat, Nottingham is multi-level on a slope, essentially dug into a cliffside. So you enter it (under a deep projecting canopy) from the top, where the shop and main galleries are, and descend to the auditorium (a Stygian space with removable bleacher seating, intended for visual art as well performance and cinema – a conference was on the day I visited) and cafe. Between the two levels is a mezzanine with administration and education spaces. In the circulation areas, intensely-coloured sprayed insulation is used as a ceiling material, or rough-and-ready plywood in the shop upstairs. But curators would recognise the largely rectilinear Nottingham galleries as (windows to the world probably excepted) ‘correct’. They were working very nicely for a fine show of early Hockney, though this did mean blanking out the skylights to bring the light levels down to conservation standards. In Rome, the gallery spaces are less ‘incorrect’ than you might think – all the paraphernalia of specialist lighting, air handling, heavy goods lifts, hanging points and so on are present and correct, so it really only comes down to the shapes of the floorplates and in places the slope of the walls.  These are very usable galleries.

Where do these two buildings take us, 50 years after the Guggenheim? They take us to a familiar place: the age-old struggle of the architect to make a congenial public building out of a type that could so easily just be a windowless toplit box. This battle between architect and curator will never be won.  In the end, Caruso St John is more on the side of the artist.  But Zaha has produced one of her finest buildings as a place of public promenade. Time alone will tell who’s got the mix more right.