Description
A bathhouse, a town hall, a university – the building that now houses Goldsmiths, the art school of the University of London, is located in New Cross, a district in southeast London. Coming from the overground line, the ornate building of the former Deptford Town Hall, designed in 1905 by Henry Vaughan Lanchester and Edwin Alfred Rickards, marks the entrance to a sprawling campus. No less magnificent is the façade of the old bathhouse, the “Laurie Grove Baths” that flanks a side street, built in 1895-98 according to plans by Thomas Dinwiddy. A passageway from here into the campus is richly decorated in Jacobean style, but gradually reveals its social reality the further one progresses towards the courtyard: the bathhouse, which abuts against two-storey single-family terraced houses above the passageway, was a completely functional building.
The University of London acquired the empty building in the 1990s, gutted it and converted the central Bath Hall into studio spaces for the students at Goldsmiths. The rear part, which contained the water tanks, pumps, and laundry and laundry rooms, remained unused until its recent conversion into a gallery for contemporary art, developed by the London architecture collective Assemble.
It contains exhibition spaces not for students but for artists from outside. This decision to create a venue of inspiration for the university and neighbourhood was the subject of controversial debate. The lower part of the campus, on which the Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) is located, is dominated by the seven-storey Ben Pimlott Building, housing the studios for visual and digital arts, opened in 2005. Opposite it are several barracks containing offices and seminar rooms. The site is to be restructured in the coming years according to a master plan.
Assemble’s design for the gallery takes up this vision of a more open space created by liberating it of the barracks. In their conversion, the architects celebrate the old water tanks enthroned on a brickwork base and carve a two-storey void into the middle of the building around which they wrap the remaining exhibition areas. The rooms each have a character of their own, crookedly cut, connected as an enfilade, with raw walls, roughly plastered, traversed by pipes and still exhibiting remnants of their original use, such as old laundry shelves. Above the entrance, the architects added an elevated metal box, creating an exhibition space on the upper floor and a buffer space on the ground floor between the foyer and the courtyard. The idea of turning found items into beautiful things can also be seen in the cross-shaped bracing of the old steel containers that appear both inside and outside. Nevertheless, the construction of the tanks needed to be reinforced as the balance of forces was reversed: instead of containing the pressure of water from inside, the freely spanning spaces are now exposed to wind loads from outside. In addition, the tanks were made one bay higher to create a clerestory strip for light to enter the interior.
Drawings
Ground floor plan, scale 1:333
Second floor plan, scale 1:333
Third floor plan, scale 1:333
Sction, scale 1:333
South elevation, scale 1:333
West elevation, scale 1:333
Photos
New and old facade patterns: The water tanks were partly converted into exhibition rooms. The constructively crossed steel pilaster strips of their walls refer to the new greenish fibre cement panels without imitating them.
The void, which is driven into the middle of the building, can be seen from the ground floor through doors and openings.