Martin Lau(@m.archtino) The project starts from the polemic set by the closure of the New Art Gallery Walsall gallery, a regional art gallery in the United Kingdom. It is opened in 2000 at a public cost of £21m. Its success in drawing in audiences from the local area, as well as providing a fillip to Walsall, an area in which 40% of children live in poverty, has been used as a template for regional galleries that opened subsequently, including the Hepworth Wakefield, the Turner Contemporary in Margate and the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. The New Art Gallery Walsall is used as an architectural case study. The reason behind is that it has a similar contextual setting as my project brief. My project sets foot in Bradford, where constructing a new gallery will be considered as another “regional gallery”, since it is outside London. Therefore, by studying The New Art Gallery Walsall in architectural interpretation, it may inform possible solutions to make regional gallery less dependent on local council funding and more sustainable on its functionality.
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