Gently does it

They may be low on drama, but Sheffield's Millennium Galleries have elegance in spades. By Jonathan Glancey

It is refreshing to find a new building that weaves its way subtly through a city rather than making a grand, theatrical statement. This is exactly what the new Sheffield Millennium Galleries and Winter Garden promise to do. The architects, Pringle Richards Sharratt, whose first big project this is, are shaping a cluster of intelligent civic buildings that will join hitherto disconnected city streets and squares, and thus provide new routes through Sheffield's centre. The galleries will bring together clear-spirited, clean-cut architecture with high-quality art of every sort. It may prove to be a template of how to develop ambitious new buildings - shopping centres and offices as well as museums and art galleries - bang in the middle of cities.

The public art galleries open next month and the Winter Garden, a roofed-over city park, in about a year's time. Work is progressing fast as the finely cast prefabricated concrete sections of this group of buildings are bolted together. Here is a city building project exhibiting grace and good manners even before completion. It deserves to succeed.

The galleries will house temporary exhibitions, some shipped in from the Tate, the Victoria and Albert Museum and other major institutions. They will also be home to the Ruskin Gallery (the collection of John Ruskin's Guild of St George, which sponsored workmen to produce craft objects in the late 19th century), and new Metalwork and Craft and Design galleries reflecting Sheffield's historical place at the centre of the British steel industry.

Set near the existing cultural complex comprising the Crucible and Lyceum theatres, and the Graves Art Gallery and Central Library, the galleries insinuate their way gently through a part of the city centre that had become ragged and unsightly by the 1990s. One of the nastiest buildings here was the 1970s eggcrate-shaped city council office, which has been demolished to make way for the centre.

Running the length of the Millennium Galleries is a covered street - the Avenue - from where the exhibition spaces can be accessed. Daylight pervades the galleries. There is no sudden transition between the outside, the Avenue and the galleries; instead the levels of daylight fall ever so gently as visitors, or those just passing through from one side of the city centre to the other, walk under the glazed barrel vaults of the Avenue and the galleries.

Subtle lighting comes from daylight which bounces off reflectors set around the perimeter of each vault. What this means is that the ceilings will be painted gently rather than scorched by the sun even in the height of the summer. And artificial light is only really needed when the sky is overcast or at night when the lights turn on automatically and very gradually.

Two further refinements make the galleries special. First, all services - heating, ventilation equipment and so on - are concealed underground: here is a modern architecture free of exposed ducts, tubes and plumbing. As a result the galleries, despite being very much of our time, have an almost classical feel about them - lofty spaces recalling the basilicas of ancient Roman cities. The administration offices are tucked away in a separate Georgian town house alongside the new buildings: the gallery is entirely freed of clutter, technical and bureaucratic.

Second, all the galleries, and the Winter Garden, are gained from one level - the Avenue. Planned in an easy, democratic manner, the Sheffield galleries should attract audiences with relatively little effort. Though as the sad fate of the city's National Centre for Popular Music shows, no amount of investment in entertaining or even profound architecture can make up for a lack of curatorial direction or lacklustre content.

There have been several missed opportunities over the past decade to thread big new buildings, and especially museums and galleries, through old town and city centres. Institutions, no matter how benevolent, like to make a splash with their buildings. Today most museums want to do what Frank Gehry did for the Guggenheim in Bilbao. Yet this highly theatrical building occupies what was effectively an empty docklands site; it can afford to be a noisy neighbour.

Not so, for example, the Tate St Ives. Arguably this is too cumbersome a building for the picturesque, raggedy, sea-washed Cornish resort. It might have been better off as a loose-fit group of modest-looking galleries winding their way through a part of the town, making easy connections to flanking lanes and offering unexpected views of the Atlantic between stirring seascapes. The Tate might, in other words, have offered a kind of artistically heightened walk through a delightful seaside town. The Sheffield galleries are an attempt to do this in the far more muscular landscape of South Yorkshire.

There is of course a much grander precedent for buildings like this. The English medieval cathedral was, typically, a poetic meeting of several minor buildings - chapter house, cloister and so on - gathered around the great stone ship of the main body of the church. For example, Wells cathedral in Somerset is grand and imposing when seen from its west front. But to enter it, and stroll through it and its associated buildings, is like walking through a curious and beautiful covered city with many different routes around it.

More coolly rational examples of buildings that thread through city centres are the great shopping galleries that were built in Milan and Naples in the late 19th century. These imposing arcades with their shops and cafes were to become the model - albeit in a distorted and bloated form - of the modern shopping mall. It comes as no surprise to see the architects' drawings for the Sheffield Millennium Galleries making reference to the Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele in Milan.

The highlight of the complex for most people is most likely to be the Winter Garden. Its sequence of high pointed roofs is gothic in inspiration, a fine foil to the essentially classical galleries it soars above. It will have benches, kiosks, and pavement cafes around its edge and a central space in front of the galleries for entertainments. But, say the architects pointedly, "it is definitely not a covered shopping mall."

It is encouraging to see that buildings of distinction are emerging that have no need to scream, "Look at me!" There's the Millennium Seed Bank in Sussex, the exciting, yet essentially gentle Eden project in Cornwall and now these Millennium Galleries and Winter Garden in South Yorkshire. Here and there, subtlety is beginning to replace bombast - and we'll be much better off for it. 

Link: Guardian 26th March 2001

© Guardian News & Media Limited 2001