Hall of Quiet

A museum is usually a sequence of walls. This one is a sequence of decisions about what a visitor is permitted to see at any moment.

One work at a time

The nine galleries are offset from one another so that no sightline reaches from one room into the next. Each turn removes the previous work from view before the following one appears. The building is therefore slower than its floor area suggests, and that slowness is the exhibit.

Light is admitted only from above, through a clerestory that runs the full depth of the plan and is baffled in cedar. The timber warms the light before it reaches the work, which gives the concrete a colour it does not actually have.

The seventh room

The seventh room has no roof. Visitors arrive at it without warning, roughly two thirds of the way through, and the interruption is the only moment in the building where the weather is allowed to participate.