Art Gallery Cork, Ireland

Architects Erick van Egeraat, Maartje Lammers
Project team Michael Rushe, Marylse van Bijleveld, Astrid Huwald, Claire Booth,
Patrick Creedon, Aylin Jorgensen-Dahl, Stefan Frommer, Folkert van Hagen,
Perry Klootwijk, Gerwen van der Linden
Structural engineer Horgan Lynch & Partners, Cork
Mechanical services engineer Ove Arup & Partners, Cork
Electrical services engineer Ove Arup & Partners, Cork
Quanity surveyor Bruce Shaw, Cork
Visualisation Models de Rijk & Parthesius, Rotterdam
Crawford Municipal Art Gallery Cork
Extension of the Crawford Municipal Art Gallery Cork
Uitbreiding van de Crawford Municipal Art Gallery Cork
Client City of Cork Vocational Education Committee
Gross floor area 830 m2
Start design 1996
Design phase 00 months
Realisation june 2000
Development time 48 months
Construction time 00 months
Contract design- workingdrawings, site supervision during construction
Current project statusrealised
Project address Emmet Place, Cork, Ireland

The Crawford Art Gallery occupies a prominent location in the heart of Cork, a small city in the south of Ireland. As a result of numerous extensions, since its construction in 1724, the building had developed into an amalgamation of various sculptural forms and spaces, none of them however suitable for contemporary or large scale exhibits. The objective was to add two new exhibition spaces and improve the public circulation route within the gallery. The extension is within the existing courtyard and resolves former dead end circulation spaces by connecting the existing floor levels with a new suspended stair. The two exhibition spaces are created with extremely different atmospheres. The upper gallery’s dramatically shaped roofs create an architectural space with natural daylight from the roof whilst the lower gallery is more silent with a glazed wall facing Half Moon Street that can be partially or fully closed by a series of wooden shutters depending on the demands of each exhibition. The new extension façade articulates the contrast, yet also the harmony, between the old and the new. The gallery has a harmonious external appearance as the previous extensions have a consistent use of brickwork throughout. The floating curved planes of the new façade are also made out of bricks that are glued together to form monolithic shells. Connected through materialisation, but distinctive in form and shape, the intervention is a contemporary addition to an existing cultural landmark that adds another layer of history to the gallery complex.

The new building, on a prominent site opposite the Tropenmuseum, completes the corner of a 19th century city block in the Dapperbuurt- area in Amsterdam. It contains commercial space and a automatic parking system on the ground floor and twelve luxury apartments on four floors above. The site is a triangular shape as is the volume of the new building. A mix of vertical and horizontal lines were chosen for the elevations both to match the existing 19th century buildings and to allow panoramic horizontal windows on the corner. The elevation changes from having a vertical character, on Mauritskade, to a more horizontal expression on the rounded corner, and then back again to a more vertical character on Von Zesenstraat. In this way the contemporary intervention pays respect to the existing neighbourhood. In plan, the floors at the corner are slightly overlap each other creating an interesting play of volumes and shadows. The elevation is dominated by two kinds of different dark coloured natural stones with broken and sand blasted surfaces. Painted timber window frames are combined with a coated metal sheet in aluminium colour, which due to the bend at the corner reflects the sunlight in different ways. Each apartment is reached through it’s light loggia which prevents long corridors and allows orientation to the outside as well as to the apartment itself.