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Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art review – a glowing DIY labyrinth

It was a risk to put this gallery in the hands of a Turner-winning radical architecture collective – but it has paid off with a building that merges industrial heft with light-touch craft

A catalogue of agricultural shed components might not be the first thing that most architects would reach for when charged with designing a contemporary art gallery in London, but then most of them don’t think like the young collective Assemble. Hearing two of its members enthuse about the limitless possibilities offered by a brochure of fibre-cement sheeting, you get a taste of the combination of poetry and pragmatism behind their new £4.2m home for Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art.

“It is a very cheap material,” says Adam Willis, who led the project with Paloma Strelitz, pointing to the corrugated boards that they have used to clad part of the building. “But it also has this special handmade quality, and it comes in an amazing range of profiled ridges and flashing details.” The architects have reworked this off-the-peg kit of parts, usually used for barn rooftops, to form a carefully panelled facade, each element hand-stained a watery bluish grey in their studio workshop to elevate it above the farmyard norm.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Pi3axi

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