Pallant House Gallery
Project: Pallant House Gallery
Location: Chichester, West Sussex
Architect: Long and Kentish
Bricks: Charnwood Forest Brick - Dark Victorian Red
The Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, designed by Long and Kentish in association with Professor Sir Colin St John Wilson, was awarded the Gulbenkian Prize for Museums and Galleries in May 2007.
The annual prize of £100,000 is presented to one museum or gallery anywhere in the UK for excellence and innovation. This year’s award was particularly poignant as Professor Wilson, the architect of the British Library, died that same month.
The judges were won over by the flair and sensitivity with which the new building had been integrated with the original Queen Anne House and the aesthetically and intellectually satisfying displays. Built in 1713, Pallant House is the earliest and one of the grandest of the 18th century brick houses in the cathedral city of Chichester, East Sussex. It has seven bays, with the three central bays set forward. The main front faces west. There is a semi basement, a raised ground floor, a first floor and an attic storey.
The grade-I-listed house is built in Flemish bond with rusticated corners and the bricks are high quality light reds. The principal feature is the entry with a doorway approached by eight steps, flanked by stone Corinthian columns with a segmental pediment above. Inside, a fine staircase rises from the grand hall that runs across a third of the house. The rear facade has a central door to stairs leading to the garden with a tall, semi-circular-headed window lighting the stairs and landing.
Walter Hussey, Dean of Chichester Cathedral from 1955 to 1977, gave his art collection to the city on condition that it was displayed in Pallant House. Other bequests followed and in the mid-1990s the gallery was approached by Professor Sir Colin St John Wilson and his wife and fellow architect M J Long with a view to receiving their extensive collection of 20th century art. This was the point at which the trustees realised an extension was necessary.
Pallant House occupies the south-west corner of the site and by demolishing buildings along the northern and eastern boundaries it was possible to plan a building entered from the west – North Pallant – that wrapped around a garden to the east of the house. The outer skin of this building is brick while the inner skin of the garden gallery and the restaurant is glazed. The top-lit galleries are at first-floor level.
The facade to North Pallant uses English bond laid with the same meticulous care with which the rest of the building is constructed. The distinctive slots modulate the building’s mass, so it complements rather than competes with the elevation of Pallant House.
The galleries have air input and extract at high level but the heating and cooling is run from a geothermal plant that cuts carbon emissions by between 40% and 50%.
The Pallant House Gallery has one of the best small collections of 20th century British art in the UK, with works by artists ranging from Peter Blake, David Bomberg and Patrick Caulfield to Ben Nicholson, John Piper, Walter Sickert and Graham Sutherland. Enjoyment of the exhibits is now enhanced by the pleasure of seeing them in a building that is beautifully designed and built.
Thanks are due to David Kennett and his article on Pallant House in the British Brick Society’s Information 10, April 2007.