The Architecture of Disenchantment

     Last week a welcome return trip to Brecon in the Usk Valley. On our last visit the museum was closed for a major re-ordering. The Museum reopened in 2019 and then, obviously, closed due to Lockdown in 2020, so this was our first opportunity to look round. Now, before I go any further I should say that the project has been controversial, the project being neither to schedule or budget, and may still be the subject of a council enquiry. This post is not about the logistics of the scheme but its aesthetic qualities, which are sadly baleful.

     But first a little history, a little context. The site, I think, is situated just within the circle of the Medieval town wall, at the point where it meets the main road east out of the town. It is  roughly triangular; if it helps think of a leaf with its point to the east. And it is at that apex stands the most important structure on the site: The Shire Hall of 1839-43, by T H Wyatt and D Brandon; Neo-classical and remarkably correct and severe for its date with none of that richness, even over ornamentation, that is associated with the 'Victorian'. Doric order under the influence of the heavy architecture of the Magna Greacia, and lots of plain wall surface. Crisp detailing.  It has to be noted that it is built of ooltic limestone from the Limestone Belt. For many years it served as the Assize Court and the court room is a particularly fine space, with a beautiful apse at the west end. After the court moved out, the building became a museum and art gallery. The recent work has been added at the rear of the Shire Hall as part of a multi-million pound redevelopment - a 'cultural hub', God help us, called 'Y Gaer', the fort. The architects are PowellDobson. And to be fair to the architects at this point I have to say that the brief was a difficult one: the site is cramped and there was a lot to cram in - library, café, teaching space etc.

     And so to the new work. Our first view was from the car park on Canal Rd., and it was not good. Chaotic. Discordant. The architecture of Disenchantment in which nothing has been really resolved or reconciled. And while one can have some sympathy for the idea of giving expression to the various functions of a building like this, the truth is that this symbolic language is used here in a purely arbitrary manner. Old and new stand together rather like an unhappily married couple, barely taking to one another. From our low vantage point the 'cultural hub' (ha,ha,ha) consists of three sections; (from the right) the side of the old Shire Hall, a glass and steel atrium, and a taller red-clad block, the most prominent feature of this side of the building (you can hardly call it a façade). It presents itself as one of those 'basking shark' facades rather like the open end of an enormous cardboard box that suggests it contains a single volume space, a significant space.  These things have been oh-so-fashionable recently. I suppose the original 'basking shark' was 'The Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts' by Norman Foster, completed in 1978.
     We approached the 'complex' from Captain's Walk - itself now contentious - and its lack of integration with the warp and weft of the urban fabric became clear. Closer to, the cladding reveals itself to be stone or an imitation thereof. I couldn't decide. The colour (which is strident) suggests the former, but I could be wrong. Perhaps the elements may have a tempering effect over time. Now these oblong slabs have a remorseful logic of their own which works well enough on the long west façade but on the short end facades this logic simply breaks down. The attempt at a resolution of the conflict between architecture and material was inept. It just wasn't thought out properly. The utter rigidity of the dimensions of the cladding slab dictate everything in these circumstances. The design should have been re-thought.  The entrance façade is just as ill-handled as the south façade. 

      The interior is no better. The atrium is incoherent and the clad block reveals itself as a merely inconsistently applied façade. Nothing more. It contains no significant space. All that signification, that symbolic representation of interior space expressed on that outward facing façade has been immediately subverted. It cannot even contain the library which spills out into the atrium. There is a total lack of integration between the old and the new, with the former, one feels, looked upon as an embarrassment. In all a terrible disappointment, and in many ways symbolic of our age.