Despite being 'assembled from fragments', like the Midlands city in which it is located, the new extension to the Herbert Art Gallery provides a new refinement and logic to the previously eclectic museum and its environs. David Littlefield describes how Pringle Richards Sharratt have realised this new coherency through artful layering, reorientation and rationalisation.

Coventry’s Herbert Art Gallery and Museum is a curious institution. It contains a little of everything: artworks, archaeological artefacts, bits of machinery, a history of Lady Godiva, the city archives, a missile, a medieval loom and many other curios. The building itself is a little odd too. When completed in 1960 it turned its back on the city’s ruined cathedral and Sir Basil Spence’s replacement, finished two years later. The idea of forming one corner of a new city square was not part of the building’s role, and instead the principal entrance faced a new and rather busy road.

What Pringle Richards Sharratt (PRS) has done is turn the building around, in every sense of the phrase. The entire project was driven by a response to the medieval grid of prewar Coventry and views across to the cathedral; the original entrance has been closed off and access points located in quieter, pedestrian zones. It is also a more polite building – a little quirky, but something with personality rather than the monolithic (and, in parts, Brutalist) original. Designed by Albert Herbert, a relative of benefactor Sir Alfred Herbert, a good deal of the original building still survives, and earlier improvements by Haworth Tompkins helped steer the Herbert towards rehabilitation. PRS has gone much, much further and almost entirely reinvented it. It has been a long process. The practice was appointed in November 2002, but changes of mind and funding problems (partly due to political changes at the city council) caused one delay after another; PRS’ first scheme, granted planning consent in August 2004, was scrapped and a replacement design was not approved until almost a year and a half later.

What makes this £11.5 million project so interesting is that it has been driven by the architectural programme rather than by the design language. ‘We don’t want to be dogmatic about these things,’ says partner John Pringle. Painfully aware that Coventry was once a marvel of Medievalism, the architects have worked hard to respond to archaeological traces. The grain of a strip of town houses nearby, demolished in the 1950s, has been picked up by slabs of Corten steel that function as sculptures in a ‘peace garden’. Moreover, these floor plans have been projected into the new Herbert building, giving much of the newbuild a distinctive twist, a certain obliqueness in plan that can only have given the engineers a headache.

The building runs north–south, but is doing everything it can to veer counter-clockwise; the lateral elements have torn themselves free of an east–west straitjacket and now lie along an axis that is more east–north–east, aligning themselves with their medieval forebears. What this does is to also focus views slightly askance. Immediately to the north of the Herbert is a rather ugly student accommodation block, but the endwall of the new arcade is set (of course) along a diagonal, and therefore frames views of the cathedral. The Herbert tries to reverse the recent architectural history of Coventry; rather than begin at Year Zero, the building has a sense of the ground that it occupies. It therefore becomes something of a hybrid.

Structurally, too, it is a hybrid. Six years ago PRS envisaged a vaulted arcade covering the space between a pair of parallel, two-storey wings one new, the other dating from 1964. The older wing came to be demolished and replaced by a single-storey building, so the canopy took on something of an S-shape, negotiating the space between buildings of different heights. At the lower end the roof is pure post and beam, but then it sweeps up and assumes something of a gridshell structure, the threads of which are aligned with both the cathedral and those lost medieval houses. There are other contrasts. The arcade and single-storey history centre use spruce as the structural material, but the two-storey exhibition block is concrete, exposed for its thermal mass and cooling properties. Some parts of the building are naturally ventilated; others are mechanically air conditioned. There is an awful lot going on here.

So what stops this building becoming a mish-mash of style, technique and response? It can only be the care with which this experienced firm of architects has approached the project. A scheme which blends subtlety and complexity like this can be achieved only by obsessing over the detail and keeping a firm grasp on the concept. PRS also has a strong sense of what is, and what is not, appropriate. Some of the fixtures of the original building (like the distinctive metal-framed windows and outsized architraves) have been left in place, while a handful of spaces have been entirely refashioned.

There is also a layering to the way the entire ensemble is perceived and experienced. On the one hand, the practice does not want the building to be considered clever or sophisticated – just a natural and comfortable place to be. ‘The idea is that you don’t feel intimidated. It’s not a temple to high culture,’ says Pringle. But on the other hand, there are ever increasing levels of refinement which are there to be appreciated if only one stops to look for them: the plan as parallelogram rather than a rectangle, the ways in which the building is assembled from fragments (like Coventry itself), the reoriented views, the markings in the landscape which trace the footprints of disappeared buildings (and the granite line which plots the presence of a very real medieval vault below ground, now accessed through a corridor of the utmost austerity).

The Herbert is now a building that spills out into the landscape. A cloister runs beneath an overhanging roof containing no gutter (creating, when its rains, a waterfall which drops directly into an inconspicuous drain). The peace garden has been intelligently thought out, and the Corten sheets have been incised with the names of people who once lived in the houses that stood here. Amphitheatre steps deal with the changing topography while encouraging people to stop and sit. Gripes? Just one. The way that Event Communications has delivered the interpretation and curation of gallery objects is very often intrusive, heavy handed and patronising – interesting objects can be lost among all the sound, colour and interactivity. But this is not the fault of PRS, which has endeavoured to create both a building and a civic space. The result is a vaguely eccentric and eminently likeable building which makes more and more sense the longer one looks at it. 

David Littlefield is an architectural writer. He has written and edited a number of books, including Architectural Voices: Listening to Old Buildings, published by John Wiley & Sons (October 2007). He was also the curator of the exhibition ‘Unseen Hands: 100 Years of Structural Engineering’, which ran at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2008. He has taught at Chelsea College of Art & Design and the University of Bath.

Text © 2009 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.