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BUILDING PROJECTS
THE RICHARD ROGERS DRAWING GALLERY AIX-EN-PROVENCE
Drawn into nature
Richard Rogers’ final project is the latest addition to an array of modern architecture at Château La Coste, near Aix-en-Provence. Jack Wooler reports on a gravity-defying cantilevered design that soars over its woodland setting
A
long a historic Roman road that leads past Château La Coste in southern France, The Richard
Rogers Drawing Gallery’s cantilevered form projects through the woodlands. It’s an architectural gesture that’s both striking, featuring a bold orange steel structure, and delicate – barely impacting on the landscape around it in terms of its footprint. The Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners
(RSHP)-designed project provides a 120 m2 gallery space for the Château. It sits in a 500-acre area of outstanding natural beauty and already includes an art and architecture centre, wine estate, restaurants, and luxury hotel. The new gallery will host a variety of exhibitions within its unique housing. The project takes the form of a timber panelled and steel-clad box inside an orange-painted, tubular steel ‘cage,’ cantilevering out 27 metres to a point 18 metres above the heavily wooded site. The structure proudly displays hand- finished welded joints, showing how they support the lightweight, ‘extruded’ gallery. The project is the fruit of over a decade of conversations between the practice and client – and friend of Richard Rogers – Irish developer and hotelier Paddy McKillen, who owns the Château. This building is the renowned architect’s last before his retirement, and joins the ‘architectural walk’ on McKillen’s estate that features projects by other major architects including a gallery by Renzo Piano, a restaurant by Tadao Ando, and a ‘wine cellar’ by Jean Nouvel. With a design aiming for minimum impact on its environment, the gallery barely connects to the ground, with just
four modest steel footings touching the earth – two pivot points at the edge of the hillside and two sets of four tension rods tying the building to the ground. The foundations are concrete, but the steel exoskeleton provides a flexible form responding to the forces as required. The building envelope is both heavily insulated and projects beyond the glazed end facades to ensure that the internal environment can be sufficiently controlled to ensure flexibility for the likely range of artworks to be displayed.
The gallery itself forms an industrial sculpture in its own right.
A gap among the trees
The architects say that it was immediately clear to them where the project should sit, on their first visit to the site. Located off a dirt track, with limited vehicular access, the steep uncultivated woodland site offered a naturally formed gap among the trees through which the building could be ‘launched.’ “As if by nature, here was this idyllic spot for a gallery,” says Stephen Spence, lead architect, of his first impressions of the site. “All we had to do then was to design the most appropriate form for the location.”
According to the architect, in the early stages the team looked at various options, largely focused on how to deal with the steeply sloping site in order to minimise any visual disruption. The other key constraint was avoiding the ancient Roman road, which the client and architects wanted to leave untouched.
ADF JULY 2021
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