The missing link: in the Galician city of A Coruna, Grimshaw's first gallery demonstrates the practice's trademark ingenuity with a unique glass and marble skin.

The Caixa Galicia Art Foundation is a significant building. Significant for its city, providing a new cultural focus (with galleries, a cafe and an impressive subterranean venue), and significant for its patron, Caixa Galicia, a cooperative bank that re-invests profits into civic cultural amenity. For the architects, too, it is significant. For the practice, adding the first gallery to its extensive portfolio, and for the project team who endured almost a decade of hard graft. Now completed, the building presents a conceptual directness--true to the origins of its 1996 competition-winning success--that appeals to many, explaining its public popularity in an otherwise conservative provincial capital.

Situated on an infill site between the main harbourside promenade and the more intimate Calle Estrella, the directness of its form is consistent with much of Grimshaw's work: smoothing over the sort of inconvenient and apparently inconsequential urban idiosyncrasies that more sensitive approaches might respond to. Diagrammatically simple, it achieves its necessarily iconic state through plan and section that reveal the architect's predetermined objectives. The scale drop of four storeys is resolved within a wave-like rolling form (originally conceived to have a smooth skin) and the plan is divided by a full-height atrium that provides a public route across the site at grade broadly separating galleries on one side from cellular support spaces on the other. In detail, too, the architect's skill is clear to see, with ambitious junctions masterfully executed, maintaining the practice's now relatively unfashionable interest in the integration of product, component and building design.

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At extremes of scale the building is resolved with a series of first and last moves that show Grimshaw's trademark ingenuity. Diagrammatically the concept is bold and contextually responsive, contributing to the public realm and to the composition of the streetscape. In detail it also deserves scrutiny, with a skin that comprises a continuous array of overlapping glazed panels, each with its own integrated gutter, and each revealing a surprising double life as the marble interlayer turns translucent at dawn and dusk. Despite this, and regrettably for those who have admired much of the practice's earlier work, in the evolution of this particular beast there appears to have been a crucial missing link.

Inevitably the project suffered from late changes to the brief, changes that in ideal circumstances would have provoked a radical rethink, rather than being shoehorned into the original concept. The late inclusion of a 300-seat auditorium was well resolved, successfully integrated by extending the cut-back raking facade beyond the lower ground temporary exhibition space to form the auditorium's graceful under belly. Changes to the conditioning and configuration of the galleries, however, were less well handled, resulting in an uncomfortable and wretched struggle that exists on the building's cramped cross axis. Originally intended to be open-sided, the galleries were planned to benefit from their proximity to, and connection with, the vertiginous urban ravine. In reality, however, with more onerous environmental targets demanding an airtight enclosure, a panelised glass wall has contaminated the purity of the composition. Not only has the material clarity of the building been lost, introducing a similar but different translucent screen that returns inside the building, creating contradictory internal conditions with thin glass-facing monolithic polished plaster. It has also made everything feel just too close for comfort, taking the potential tension of juxtaposition and counterpoint to an uncomfortable extreme. This tension goes on to amplify a more fundamental issue that relates to the architect's failed attempt to subvert subtleties in the geometry of the site. The result is an apparently insignificant 2 degree eccentricity in plan, amplified in elevation, that disrupts the view from back to front as cramped elements annoyingly don't quite line up: one of a number of eccentricities that neither intentionally nor accidentally exploit the specificity of the site.

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In isolation this building is certainly worthy of note, as a collection of unique spaces and details. In context, as a unified whole, however, it is not a thoroughbred, bearing neither the rigour or contextual specificity of Waterloo (AR September 1993), nor the appropriate sensitivity of Bath Spa (AR September 2003). Perhaps this is symptomatic of a practice in transition. More specifically to this project, however, it is symptomatic of a building that exhibits two parallel streams of conscious thought, with wonderful ideas in concept and detail that never quite meet. As a model it exemplifies how an uncompromisingly High-Tech aesthetic can struggle to find its place in the city, where precision engineered buildings wrestle with imprecise urban situations.

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