Herbert Art Gallery & Museum

 

Herbert Art Gallery & Museum

We were the lead strutucral engineers for this 6,600m2, £13.2m project that houses galleries, a museum, city archives, a history centre, community arts studios, a temporary exhibition centre, a cafe and the museum shop.

The design for the extension to the existing museum building turned the back of the existing building into a new front, facing towards the Cathedral and University Square, the city’s principal tourist attraction, creating a route connecting it to the existing main entrance. The building closes the south easterly corner of the square with a positive urban statement, in the form of a two-storey, high glazed route flanked by new galleries and a history centre.

We developed a delicate timber diagrid roof to cover a new internal court, archive store and reading room at the heart of the reconfigured complex, and engineered a two-storey gallery extension. The roof over this new arcade and History Centre is a dramatic exposed Glulam gridshell, inspired by the roof structure of Sir Basil Spence’s Cathedral opposite, and cross-laminated timber panels. Raked timber columns support this structure on curved beams above the History Centre along the western edge, while the new two storey pre-fabricated, white concrete gallery extension offers support along the east.

“The gridshell roof of the Herbert – a cap doffed, so to speak, to the cathedral’s marvellous roof structure – rises and falls like a languidly breaking wave over the museum’s new arcade and history centre, its fine, gutterless edge stopping a few metres short of a line of rust-patinated Cor-Ten steel panels.” - The Independent, 2009

Client: Coventry City Council
Architect: Pringle Richards Sharratt
Image: Courtesy of the architect