Intelligent design

The Grade I listed Queen Anne townhouse in North Pallant in the city of Chichester, for the past 20 years the home of Walter Hussey’s collection of modern British art, has been closed while undergoing a major extension project. I have been following the fortunes of Pallant House since the late-1970s, when I lived locally. Once it opened in 1982, I visited regularly and watched the development of the collection with interest, particularly the addition of the Charles Kearley Bequest in 1989. At that point, the collection was a little gem of 20th-century art — mostly British, with some European additions. Now it has received a further boost. The house has reopened to universal acclaim with an £8.6 million contemporary wing, built to house the substantial collection of Professor Sir Colin St John Wilson, more familiarly known as Sandy, distinguished architect of the British Library.

Designed by architects Long & Kentish in association with Wilson, and financed by the Heritage Lottery Fund and the generosity of individual benefactors, the new wing effectively quadruples the available gallery space in Pallant House. This light and airy modern building is a delight to visit, and, unlike most new art galleries, has been designed to show art to best advantage. Thus it makes considerable use of natural light, through a system of roof shutters, and concentrates on providing a sequence of gallery spaces that offers a sympathetic context for hanging paintings. The results are impressive.

Sandy Wilson’s collection numbers some 400 works, many of them major paintings by friends and contemporaries such as R.B. Kitaj and Peter Blake. It’s not every day that a considerable modern architect gets to design a gallery for his own collection, but then it’s rare for an architect to care much for art.