Concrete and clay.

First considered in these pages as a project, in our Canadian special issue of 1993, Patkau Architects' museum for contemporary clay and glass has now reached fruition. The building combines civic sensibility with tectonic presence.

The Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery in Waterloo is a national gallery. It is all the more surprising then that it is not located in one of the country's big cities or in Ottawa. Instead, this recently completed gallery has been built in a small town in south-western Ontario. It is a modest place with a population of about 80 000 which, with the neighbouring towns of Kitchener and Cambridge, has become absorbed in a sprawling settlement that spreads across Highway 401 - the main route linking Toronto with Detroit and the industrial heartlands of North America.

This is an area of small-scale industry and prosperous farms set within gently rolling landscapes on the extreme southern edge of the country. Both Kitchener and Waterloo grew in the late nineteenth century with development focused around main streets that remained lively and intact until the radical redevelopments of the '50 and '60s. While Kitchener has sought to rebuild its main street - most recently with an impressive new town hall (AR October 1994), King Street the main street of Waterloo, and its surroundings have been transformed. The site for the new gallery is close to King Street, alongside a small lake and next to a random collection of industrial buildings - some of which have been converted to house the Seagram Museum. Yet the construction of extensive parking areas, service roads and large, anonymous new buildings perhaps typified by the inappropriately named Waterloo Town Square on King Street (not a square at all but a large internalised suburban shopping mall dropped into town and inadequately camouflaged even by words) has transformed this particular town. It was a setting that prompted John and Patricia Patkau, the architects of the competition-winning scheme (AR May 93) for the new gallery to comment that 'this project ... did not have a "site". Most of our other projects have very strong, evident sites ... we decided to create a site'.(1)

As the project demanded the creation of a site, so the design of this particular building also represents an attempt to re-invent a familiar and historic building type. The need to reconsider the form of the gallery was developed out of the specific requirements for the project. An initial feasibility study of the scheme prepared in 1984 was entitled 'The Gallery of Earth and Fire'. The spirit of this alchemical reference - from earth and fire to clay and glass- and the subsequent reiteration of the importance of the act of making defined by the original competition brief informed the winning design and inspired its eventual development.

The design competition, which was held in 1986 with invitations extended to eight architects from across Canada and judged by a distinguished jury that included Kenneth Frampton, envisaged galleries with studios for working artists, a lecture theatre, administrative offices, a library and archive. This was to be a gallery that underlined the importance of the process of making and which emphasised its place in the sequence from fabrication through collection and selection to the public exhibition of the work itself. Unfortunately, the project was delayed for two years through lack of funding. Rising inflation during that time necessitated a reconsideration of the project's requirements when it eventually got under way. Consequently the gallery which has been built is one third smaller in area than the 2500[m.sup.2] competition-winning scheme. The studios were omitted and the building was redesigned to provide space primarily dedicated to exhibition. With the revised scheme, the manner in which these galleries were developed now had to provide the critical context for understanding institutionalised culture. It was in this context that the integration of process and product, with its emphasis on the craft of making, was to remain a primary concern of both designers and client. More recently, this has been developed in the actual use of the space by Suzanne Greening, the director of the gallery.

The finalised plan consists of two long and largely open rooms orientated along a north-south axis and sharing a central thick wall that houses stairs, an elevator and building services. It is also used as a device to bring natural light into the heart of the building. The main gallery is housed within the larger room located on the western side. Three distinct towers are contained within this main gallery. Assigned as 'totemic elements' by the designers, two of these are enclosed: one provides a gallery for the display of large pieces and the other is a small works gallery with a meeting room above. The third is open to the sky, and forms a courtyard for outdoor displays. The adjoining room also has space for exhibitions alongside amenities and a mezzanine floor of offices. Additional layers of space on the eastern edge of the building are formed by a generous lobby and a canopy. This steel canopy, together with a series of six free-standing 'fire columns', defines a colonnade across the extended face of the gallery that is aligned with the forecourt of the neighbouring Seagram Museum, and forms an entrance with a porte-cochere fronting the street.

The galleries are daylit by a series of generous windows, rooflights and glazed bays - a move which was possible as the artefacts to be exhibited were not sensitive to ultraviolet light. By seizing the opportunity to display work in changing natural light, and against the backdrop of surrounding landscapes, the designers have successfully 'grounded' the gallery in the realm of the familiar rather than isolating it within the confines of closed rooms. It is here, however, that the potential of glass as a material that can filter light and achieve degrees of translucency might, rather appropriately, have been explored by the designers. Such a move may have made it possible to have had daylit galleries yet controlled views out for, in the creation of this site, much of the outlook is still across roads and the ubiquitous parking lot.

This use of daylight and the connection to the outside world, together with the relatively simple organisation of open spaces defined by explicit constructional systems of familiar materials, recalls the industrial workplace more readily than the abstract spaces of the gallery. It is, however, a reference which seems particularly appropriate for work that originates not in the sanctity of a studio but from the actions of fire on elements of the earth engineered through a series of distinctly industrial processes.

The architects have worked to establish strong connections between building, exhibit and viewer. John Patkau has commented that 'the craft of making a building which is within the range of normal experience might be transferred to the craft of making clay and glass. In this context it may be possible for people to relate more directly to the craft of making art and to understand that art is not something which is exclusively within the domain of a gallery or the domain of an elite'.(2) The design achieves this by making the construction of the building explicit and emphasising the tectonic qualities of the details of its assembly. The project also develops clear hierarchies of building materials. So while the gallery consists of a relatively simple brick-clad shell with a timber roof deck on steel framing the 'totemic elements' - those pieces assigned particular significance and consequently of emblematic importance - are made of reinforced concrete, which is viewed as the most difficult and substantial of construction materials. Each element in turn then yields further levels of detail.

Within the courtyard, for instance, the outer skin of the concrete wall is peeled away to reveal a tiled layer that represents the interstitial space between the two walls, while an added wooden frame is designed to make a distinct reference to the original formwork.

This modest new gallery, with its simple shed-like volumes constructed from a limited palette of commonplace materials which are clearly expressed and P assembled in an obvious manner, has been re-invented so as to recall the act of making. Embodying a spirit derived from the nature of the collection the spaces of the building, like those created by Donald Judd for the Chinati Foundation in Texas or the Archaeological Museum at Merida (AR November 1985) designed by Rafael Moneo, express a view of the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery not as an elaborate temple of culture or a secured storehouse for art but as a place of work, fabrication and discovery.