SUBLIME INTERVENTION

摘要

Ft is set on an industrial island in the River Calder and is even more cut off by a busy trunk road and 1960s bridge slicing past one end of its site. A working boatyard lies opposite, various fine but abandoned mill buildings are its neighbours. The centre of Wakefield is some distance away, and anyway the city loses out to nearby Leeds as the main regional centre. So David Chipperfield's latest art gallery, the Hepworth Wakefield, has a job to do. This is the most down-at-heel of contexts. It was not previously any kind of'destination', though the excellent nearby Yorkshire Sculpture Park will bring passing cultural trade. Inevitably, this £35m project forms part of a regeneration plan for the riverside, so will become less isolated. But one can forgive Chipperfield for giving his building something of a fortified character. This, the largest all-new art museum to be built in Britain since Tate St Ives in the 1990s, is a modern version of a medieval bastide. The approach over a new ramp and bridge reinforces the sense of approaching a cultural citadel.