Dulwich Picture Gallery

Dulwich Picture Gallery is a celebrated London landmark and was England’s first public art gallery, designed and completed by one of its most famous and respected architects, Sir John Soane, between 1811-14. But a public gallery that is simultaneously a mausoleum for a painting collection’s founding menage a trois is surely a strange circumstance to which architectural talent should adapt itself. Given Soane’s status, it is understandable that Rick Mather’s extensions and alterations are sensitive, contextural, and respectful of what exists, complementing both Soane’s work and the old Dulwich College buildings forming a back-drop to the Gallery. Mather’s design strategy at once leaves Soane’s pavilion alone and stands back from it, whilst simultaneously entangling it in a new architectural composition that reaches out to the boundaries, engages the old Dulwich College buildings (especially the Christ’s Chapel), the existing gateway and boundary brick walling, whilst introducing a new site concept focused upon the

empty space between the buildings (in fact, a lawn) rather than the buildings themselves. The built device that is employed is an old-fashioned one: the idea of a cloister that wraps around the perimeter of the site, runs along the older College buildings and connects to the gallery pavilion (see plan below). In fact, it is more of a ‘half-cloister’ because one half is implied rather than constructed. Nevertheless, it acts as a kind of tactful armature off which the other buildings hang, whilst the cloister itself provides an alternative means of access or egress to the gallery. A new cafe, new exhibition space and education rooms are neatly insinuated into and around this perimeter device. And as visitors perambulate this corridor they are given superbly framed views of the gallery building before they reach the side entry door to the gallery. This simple cloister / corridor becomes the key architectural piece binding the assembly of parts. But it is the green lawn – the void at the heart of this equation – that becomes the new spatial heart of the architectural parts. In this sense the idea of a cloister has been used cleverly and given its traditional role. The older gallery spaces themselves have been entirely refurbished, the roof-lights renewed etc.