Review for Architecture Today: Manalo & White’s redesign gives a new lease of life to Towner Eastbourne, designed by Rick Mather and opened in 2009.
This year’s Turner Prize winner, Jesse Darling, was announced on Tuesday 5th December at Towner Eastbourne, in a coup for the town and the gallery in its centenary year. The exhibition is one of a series of ‘Towner 100’ events, made possible in part by an ambitious redesign of the gallery’s spaces by architects, Manalo & White.
The current building was designed by Rick Mather Architects and opened in 2009, the same year the practice completed their expansion of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, which delivered four times the space, but for seven times the budget. Towner’s more economical design was praised at the time for its “giant windows, bright white walls and seductive curves.” Like many museum buildings conceived post-Bilbao, it gave the town a modest spectacle and cultural draw, but a decade on, its spaces were overdue an update.
Brian Greathead, Director of Manalo & White, describes the building as “architect-y” in the pejorative, he says: “I’m suspicious of that kind of austere taste, and how it can be part of a shared culture.” The brief was to open the interior up and make the gallery more inviting. This involved reconfiguring the entire ground floor and second-floor restaurant, improving circulation, as well as dealing with the lighting and acoustics: softening the sounds of the concrete foyer from “car park payment terminal” to the convivial chatter of a town square…
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