Kettle's Yard: Kettle's Yard is one of Cambridge's most popular cultural venues. Established by Jim Ede in 1957, its collection displays an extensive range of modern art. Likewise its buildings are an eclectic mix of old and new, with Leslie Martin's celebrated extensions. This year Jamie Fobert has been appointed as the architect for the next phase.

Kettle's Yard was once four tumbledown cottages in Cambridge. Today it is one of the City's most treasured cultural venues. In a city surrounded by the formal grandeur of collegiate and ecclesiastical architecture, this curious collection of buildings holds its own as a must see destination. As a place it has become as diverse and idiosyncratic as the collection it contains; modest, yet sophisticated, and central to the cultural activities of the local community.

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Not simply an art gallery, Kettle's Yard is many things. Established by Jim Ede in 1957, it has had a long and varied life. As the one-time home of the former Tate curator, the converted cottages were always open to students and casual visitors, who could meet with Ede in a place that he described as 'a nursery to the visual arts and an introduction to the formal art gallery like Tate or Fitzwilliam'. Keen to share his internationally renowned private collection, Ede eventually presented it as a gift to the university in 1966, who very keenly took on his legacy. Since then four subsequent phases of expansion have seen home become collection, gallery become theatre, and art space become classroom; a process that many feared would destroy its charm, but throughout which, Ede's sensibilities have been maintained.

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Soon after accepting the stewardship of Kettle's Yard, a successful appeal for funds allowed the university to build a new extension designed by Leslie Martin and David Owers; a significant phase of expansion (two phases rolled into one through the generous support of the Arts Council) that provided an additional 390sqm of display space. As featured in The Architectural Review in February 1971, the designer's preoccupation focused on how the space and light of the new could add to the progression through Ede's original home, maintaining the ambience of the original 150sqm house throughout a new 540sqm venue. Through careful planning and exploiting interconnected levels, the extension links new with old at an upper level, continuing the subtle sequence of spaces through a series of descending levels and increasing volumes. Daylighting also progresses with the domestic windows of the old, leading to the baffled top light of the long apertures that run the full length of the extension's rough plaster ceilings. With this language of incremental expansion, Martin's scheme continued to migrate across the gently falling site with two lower terraced spaces in 1980 and 1984, completed by Bland, Brown and Cole's arcaded extension along Castle Street in 1994.

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The search for an architect for the next phase of development began in January this year when Michael Harrison, Kettle's Yard director since 1992, was advised by management committee member Eric Parry to run a design competition. New education facilities were required to provide space for the annual programme of 375 education sessions currently accommodated in a rather cramped education room at the centre of the plan that could only hold half a class at a time. Having repossessed the two remaining shop fronts from tenants, sufficient space was made available to also include a new environmentally stable archive for its painting collection (that in the spirit of Ede is still offered on long loans to University students to take home), a cafe (to attract new visitors and give regulars a place to inhabit), and a more formal seminar space (for life long learning, lectures and so on).

Having invited 16 or so practices to submit examples of their work, Jamie Fobert was chosen from a high calibre shortlist that included De Rijke Marsh Morgan, Caruso St John, Stanton Williams, Ushida Findlay and 5th Studio. (A success that was shortly followed by his appointment to design the new extension at Tate St Ives.) Having spent nine years with David Chipperfield before establishing his own practice nine years ago, Jamie Fobert is emerging as an architect of distinction. By focusing on the essence of architectural space and the practicality of process led detailing, he avoids the superfluous gestures that distract so many others. As demonstrated in the Anderson House (AR April 2004), and as qualified by his admiration for the work of Morandi and Hammershoi, Fobert's work returns our attention to the potency of simple forms and volumes, and when shaping interior spaces reminds us of the importance of making decent rooms. As such, Harrison recalls how Fobert, without making any detailed proposals, had particularly impressed the jury with his reading of Kettle's Yard, its art and the evolution of its architecture. In displaying and sharing its collection, daylight is the keynote of Kettle's Yard a place of physical and spiritual illumination--and Fobert's understanding of this subtlety was key to his success. It was also important that his intervention was not an extension that melded anonymously into the existing. Having chosen Fobert, Harrison wanted to develop a proposal that was distinct from the previous phases and as 'of its time' as the original extension by Martin. Since being chosen, Fobert has developed a scheme that achieves these aspirations, working with large-scale models and free-hand sketches, to resolve a tight cluster of internal and external forms that will sit quietly behind the retained Castle Street Victorian facade. A detailed and costed proposal that will help secure the sustainable future of this wonderful place. For Fobert this is not a project to design a new building, but rather in the same way that Morandi and Hammershoi focused on the same objects for many years, he is adjusting and adding to a place that already exists. His intervention will simply be a new composition of the same place; a project that has been evolving over a number of decades.

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So, forty years on it is time once again to seek funds for the next phase. Kettle's Yard has been well supported over the years by many friends and organisations such as the Arts Council England, the Arts and Humanities Research Board, and the Henry Moore Foundation. With Fobert's new vision for the site, it is hoped that fundraising will be as successful as it was in the 1960s. Today, money is needed to help write the next chapter; a chapter that will sustain Jim Ede's original vision that Kettle's Yard would somehow represent, a continuing way of life.