RIBA Stirling shortlist 2012 – The Hepworth, Wakefield

On arrival you are drawn across an elegant bridge surrounded by strange river craft and motley industrial buildings. The gallery works beautifully with this varied and gritty context, both suggesting it belongs and at the same time is something rather special. Its scale changes as you approach and enter it, big and dramatic where it needs to be, but welcoming where it doesn’t. The carefully cast dusky mauve concrete forms make you want to stroke them as you get closer.

What appears to be a fairly random set of boxes in plan soon reveals its logic inside, with the shop, cafe, education room and offices on the ground floor radiating out from the entrance space. In the first floor galleries the circulation pattern changes subtly from radiating to radial as the promenade takes you through a series of galleries with deep walls

concealing the ventilation services.

The galleries are daylight through slit rooflights and carefully placed windows which frame views of Hemsley Moor, the Town Hall, the Weir and the Chapel on the Bridge.

The building gives a sense of being made specifically for the work of Hepworth whilst at the same time being very much of Yorkshire, grounded and granite like. An affirming project on every level.

Architect: David Chipperfield Architects

Client: Wakefield Council

The Hepworth video

Nick Hill of David Chipperfield Architects talks about the desire for the building to appear as a monolithic structure of solidity and mass and the challenges of its waterside location. Simon Wallis from the Hepworth describes the relationship between the dense colour of the building and the area’s industrial past.

Location details

The Hepworth gallery in Wakefield is approximately 1.5 miles from Wakefield town centre on the banks of the River Calder in West Yorkshire.

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