(Copyright Hugh Pearman/The Sunday Times. A fuller version of the article published on January 23, 2000, as "Public space, art gallery or pick-up joint?")
If you could distil the essence of pure modern architecture, and remove all traces of the usual compromises and cut corners and clumsy details and flash populist moves, then you would get a strange, unsettling, austere, but rather beautiful building. Such absolute purity is of course impossible to achieve. But the New Art Gallery in Walsall comes closer than any new cultural landmark built in Britain for years. It is both extraordinary and extraordinarily good. It repays attention: this is emphatically not a one-liner building.
This is what you hope the architectural competition system will produce from time to time: something entirely original, from relative unknowns. In this case, the "unknowns" are a youngish and very fastidious firm of London architects, Caruso St. John, who until they won Walsall a few years back were best known for a few reductivist interiors and one modest new Lincolnshire house. Not for them showy, sculptural architecture: Adam Caruso and Peter St. John are almost obsessively rigorous.
The New Art Gallery is set on high ground, its tall square offset tower marking out one end of this still-industrial West Midlands town. It talks to the other towers of the Edwardian town hall in the centre, and the spire of the big church across the shallow valley in which Walsall is set. It is not all that big - it cost £23 million all in, the merest fraction of what the Tate spends on its buildings. But it is heroic in scale and in ambition.
Much of the town is Anywheresville, provincial chain-store land. But not all. As it happens, there is not just a fine new art gallery to be found, but also a fine new competition-winning ovoid bus station by some other rising young 'uns, Allford Hall Monaghan Morris. The town's identity is changing in ways that would have seemed impossible a few years ago. Right at the top of the high street, a broad alleyway sneaks through a gruesome brand-new shopping development, done in the sort of illiterate knitting-pattern brickwork we all hoped had finally become extinct in Leeds in the late 1980s. Walk through here and, as the pop artist Roy Lichtenstein might say, Whaaaam!!!
Suddenly you are in a new square, laid out in broad zebra stripes of asphalt by the artist Richard Wentworth. Rising from this is the new gallery; a calm, other-worldly structure clad in huge pale terracotta tiles and stainless steel panels, the whole boxy assemblage punched through with what looks like an entirely random selection of differently-sized windows. On its far side, it commands a brimming, deserted canal basin with a lopsided, equally odd, new pub on one side. The sense of strangeness is heightened when you notice that Wentworth's stripes disappear into the distance along both sides of the canal, like a landscape from Alice in Wonderland.
Then you go inside, beneath a hovering corner of the building, improbably suspended without apparent support. Huge glass doors hiss open, admitting you to what seems a loading bay or airlock. Then a solid timber-slatted wall unexpectedly shoots open and disgorges you into an enormous foyer with a black, polished floor and a broad flight of equally black stairs. The walls around you are by turns concrete and timber: the board-makings on the concrete, the memory of the moulds in which it was poured, exactly match the width of the timber slats. The stair balustrades are covered in fine tan leather. A multitude of slender, narrow-spaced smooth concrete beams forms the ceiling high above. The whole place is sumptuously plain, enormously tactile, glorying in its handling of space and light.
