Whitlock Gallery

Works on paper are lit at fifty lux, which is roughly the light level of a restaurant at dinner. Spend an hour in a room at fifty lux and it feels normal. Walk into one from a bright foyer and you see nothing at all for the first ninety seconds.

Most gallery projects treat this as a lighting problem. It is really a sequencing problem.

The adaptation route

The plan puts a long, top-lit ramp between the entrance and the first gallery. It descends about a metre and a half over twenty-two metres, and across that length the roof lights step down in size from generous to almost nothing.

By the time you reach the gallery door your eyes have adapted. Nobody notices this happening, which is the point. The alternative — a dark lobby with a warning sign — announces the constraint instead of solving it.

Galleries as boxes within a shell

The galleries are freestanding boxes inside the masonry shell, separated from it by a service void. That void carries all the conditioning and lets the boxes be genuinely sealed, which is what the lux and humidity requirements actually demand.

It also means the collection can grow. Two of the four boxes were built with demountable end walls, and the trust has already combined them once for a larger show.

The stair

The one indulgence is the stair from the ramp to the upper study rooms: a single cast concrete flight, board-marked, with a hardwood handrail that runs unbroken from bottom to top.

A handrail you can run your hand along without lifting it is worth the six weeks of setting-out it takes to draw.

We priced a fabricated steel alternative at roughly two-thirds the cost. The trust chose the concrete, and it is the thing every visitor photographs.