Tŷ Pawb review – an art gallery that truly is everybody’s house
A covered market in Wrexham has welcomed a new exhibition and performance space in an understated revamp that unites art and commerce
There was a time when you would have known what to expect of a lottery-funded art gallery in a middle-sized town like Wrexham. It might have been a new building, or at least a conspicuously transformed old one, standing alone, its architecture making some sort of statement about its cultural contemporariness. It would probably have had more space than it really needed, a sign of optimism that it would grow to fill it. If that town also had, as Wrexham did, something like a 1990s covered market that was struggling to function as originally envisaged, that would have been a separate problem. But times have changed. Local authorities have less money to spend than they did on running things like art galleries. Ingenuity is called for. So, in the case of Wrexham, they addressed both questions at once. They put the new premises for the town’s Oriel Gallery inside the covered market.
The result is Tŷ Pawb (which, for non-Welsh-speakers, means “Everyone’s House”), a hybrid place of commerce and art. On the outside most of what you see is the original building, the market plus several levels of still used car park on top, a turreted, brick-faced example of late-flowering postmodernism, with mannered, semi-circular windows. What tells you that something has changed is paint, in broad diagonal slashes of black, with white lettering announcing what the building now is.
Inside is the original concrete structure, handsome in its functional way, cleaned of clutter and made more visible than before. Strategic cuts have been made out of the car park decks above, to give more light and height. The style of the new interventions is workaday going on austere – plywood, steel, concrete block, hanging plastic screens, visible ducts – but lifted by colour, light and care in the arrangement of each element. It has also required judicious management of a small budget, £4.3m for the construction cost. Signs and graphics, by the Cardiff-based branding firm Elfen, are an important part of the experience.
The design, by the architects Featherstone Young, aims to integrate Tŷ Pawb with its surroundings. Wrexham is a historic market town in north Wales, damaged by the loss of industries, and ringed as if by besieging armies by the encampments of supermarkets and retail parks. Tŷ Pawb is at the interface of the old, walkable town, and the new, car-based periphery that its parking serves. The layout of its internal courts and passageways, rectangular but informal, seeks to continue the fabric of older covered markets and arcades that is a distinctive feature of Wrexham.
The outcome is an indoor town square in which the market units – which sell wools, carpets, gifts, bath bombs, milkshakes or curry – coexist with a gallery whose past and future exhibitors include Grayson Perry, Bridget Riley and Cornelia Parker. A central hall, with long refectory tables and benches by the designer Tim Denton, helps to unify the whole. A new performance space, off to the side, enables film screenings, dance classes, comedy nights and talks by artists. Rotating advertising panels display specially commissioned artworks. In front of one of them, one afternoon last week, a country-and-western busker was filling the complex with sound.
The new enclosures, where possible, stop short of the ceiling, to enhance the sense of volume. They have a deliberately temporary air. The timber-clad gallery, sitting there like a big packing case, is something you come across casually, a little while after a photo booth and the ticket machines for the car park. Sarah Featherstone, of Featherstone Young, call this a “baggy space”, in which the architects “touch it as little as possible so that other people can make it their own”.
Author: Rowan Moore | The Guardian |
