Manalo & White’s redesign gives a new lease of life to Towner Eastbourne, designed by Rick Mather and opened in 2009.
This year’s Turner Prize winner, Jesse Darling, was announced on Tuesday 5th December at Towner Eastbourne, in a coup for the town and the gallery in its centenary year. The exhibition is one of a series of ‘Towner 100’ events, made possible in part by an ambitious redesign of the gallery’s spaces by architects, Manalo & White.
The current building was designed by Rick Mather Architects and opened in 2009, the same year the practice completed their expansion of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, which delivered four times the space, but for seven times the budget. Towner’s more economical design was praised at the time for its “giant windows, bright white walls and seductive curves.” Like many museum buildings conceived post-Bilbao, it gave the town a modest spectacle and cultural draw, but a decade on, its spaces were overdue an update.
Brian Greathead, Director of Manalo & White, describes the building as “architect-y” in the pejorative, he says: “I’m suspicious of that kind of austere taste, and how it can be part of a shared culture.” The brief was to open the interior up and make the gallery more inviting. This involved reconfiguring the entire ground floor and second-floor restaurant, improving circulation, as well as dealing with the lighting and acoustics: softening the sounds of the concrete foyer from “car park payment terminal” to the convivial chatter of a town square.
Joe Hill, Towner Eastbourne’s Director and CEO greets a few people as he takes a group of us through the gallery’s Turner Prize exhibits – he appears to know quite a few visitors by sight, if not all by name. Their growing numbers are a testament to his success in achieving a difficult balance between the venue as cultural destination and community centre. Contrary to its reputation as a retirement destination, Eastbourne’s overall demographic is young, but in the immediate vicinity, around 60 percent of homes are single occupancy. The Towner as a panacea for loneliness is a responsibility Hill seems to have taken to heart with “the art dose,” as he calls it.
Manalo & White’s reconfiguration of the gallery’s ground floor, and the interventions further up the building, have been done with care and skill. Greathead shares Hill’s concern for hospitality in the truest sense of the word: “It’s about being warm, genuine and opening your home to others. How do you make a space feel hospitable; how do you make people that might not feel so comfortable in a cultural venue feel that they belong there, and that they can navigate their own way around the place?”
In spatial terms, this translates into deceptively simple moves. The foyer has been enlarged at the expense of a small amount of exhibition area, and cleared of the visual and physical clutter of retail displays. Visitors can see into Studio 1, a temporary exhibition and workshop space, through a glass partition. To one side of the foyer is a smaller shop, to the other, the café, previously hidden behind two sets of double doors. Discreet acoustic baffles are integrated within the joinery and below the concrete ceilings; panels are slotted into the space in an economical arrangement – the inspiration Manalo & White finds in standard material sizes is an enjoyable quirk of the practice’s work. New moments of colour break the early millennial monochrome: a retractable green curtain that can extend around the circumference of Studio 1, a row of comfortable red benches and the red counter of the reception desk, placed sideways, so as not to confront visitors too directly.
The only sign of these changes externally is a new window, which brings light into the shop and allows the hesitant to have a peek inside before committing. Its designers talk about their focus on “what the welcome feels like, rather than what we want here or there.” Still, there is a great deal of precision in manifesting that feel. Project architect, Nicole Langridge explained the level of detail that went into synthesising all aspects of the space and programme, down to collaboration with the retail team on the display of the ideal ratio of portrait to landscape postcards.
The design process was, they say, “elongated” because of the pandemic, but this time was well spent understanding and responding to the needs of regular as well as occasional visitors. Hill explains that, with the exception of the current Turner Prize, they try to change the display in the Studio 1 gallery at least every two weeks to bring fresh interest to the foyer. Similarly, the cinema programme caters for different tastes, as well as offering enough variety for locals that might come three or more times a week. The cinema was already there, but the architects gave it slightly more prominence to make clear there is something for everyone, whether they are interested in visiting the galleries or not.
Manalo & White has transformed the second-floor restaurant, making the most of its elevated position, balcony and views of the South Downs to help make it a destination in its own right. It is designed with flexibility for events in mind, and is equally popular with everyday diners – on the day of our tour, a cold November Thursday, almost every table was busy. A yellow felt curtain softens the space and calms the noise; simple wooden tables and plants are arranged around a horseshoe bar under an array of globe lights.
The Towner is regionally as well as locally significant. Eastbourne’s nearest big city, Brighton, lacks a contemporary art venue of its scale. The galleries are white cubes, technically equipped to fulfil this role and host different types of exhibitions. These spaces are largely unchanged, save for the addition of a small concealed sink and storage, and new lighting downstairs: here, energy efficient LEDs hang on suspended tracks below the existing concrete beams to avoid overshadowing.
The budget has been spent judiciously. Areas outside the scope of this recent update include Mather’s original store, where Hill pulls out metal racks on casters to show us treasures from the Towner’s collection by the likes of Duncan Grant and Eric Ravilious. An education room, tucked away in the corner, overlooks the International Lawn Tennis Centre – the presence of the bright green courts, hidden from the entrance, comes as a bit of a surprise.
The redesign enables a subtle but fundamental shift in the building’s relationship with the town. The ground floor’s accessibility, the quality of the restaurant and the Towner’s expression of hospitality all allow for radical programming, without alienating visitors for whom the art is secondary to the tea and cake. And the gallery’s ambitions don’t stop at its threshold; following a successful bid with Eastbourne Borough Council for £19.8 million from the government’s Levelling Up Fund, there are plans for future development at Black Robin Farm in the South Downs National Park. Here, Towner is working on a new culture and education centre, with a sensitive retrofit of the existing farmstead submitted for planning this autumn by Feilden Fowles.
Externally, Towner Eastbourne signals its metamorphosis with Dance Diagonal, 2019 a technicolour painting by Lothar Götz across the facade. “The artwork on the side is to start a very different conversation with the audience locally,” explains Hill. This is the bright geometric image you see on Instagram, in brand Eastbourne’s marketing, in stripes on the posters advertising the Turner Prize show on the train. Like Manalo & White, Götz has conceived a clever reinterpretation of the existing architecture. But while the exterior might be the attraction that starts the conversation, the interior makes it last. It is the gallery’s quiet, warm welcome, the foyer’s invitation to come inside and explore, that will make perhaps the greatest difference to Eastbourne life.
