Pharmacy 2 | Caruso St John Architects

Newport Street Gallery, a new gallery designed by Caruso St John, which will present exhibitions of works drawn from Damien Hirst’s extensive art collection, will open free to the public from 8 October 2015. The gallery is housed in a renovated Victorian scenery-painting studio in Vauxhall, south London. 

The gallery is the realisation of Damien Hirst’s long-term ambition to share his collection, which includes over 3,000 works, with the public. The inaugural show will be Power Stations, a solo exhibition of paintings dated from 1964-1982 by John Hoyland (1934-2011), one of the greatest British abstract painters of his generation.

The construction of the 37,000 sq ft gallery has involved the conversion of a terrace of listed industrial buildings that were purpose built in 1913 to serve as painting studios for the booming local and West End theatre industries. The gallery runs the whole length of the street with the three listed Victorian buildings flanked at either end by new buildings. The ground and upper floors within the five buildings are continuous, allowing them to be used flexibly in many combinations to accommodate both large and small exhibitions. There are three large galleries on each of the two floors, stretching in a line from one end of the building to the other. The two gallery levels are connected by new spiral staircases and a large lift.

Along Newport Street and facing the railway, the unusual proportions of the Victorian workshops, with their groups of low level windows and high blank walls above, have been continued in the design of the new buildings. The new facades are made with a hard pale red brick that closely matches the surface of the listed buildings. The five buildings next to each other, all different but obviously related, make a sheer and impressive street elevation.

Adam Caruso and Peter St John, who established their practice in 1990, will celebrate the 25th anniversary of Caruso St John Architects this autumn with the completion of three major cultural projects in the UK: the new Newport Street Gallery and Gagosian Grosvenor Hill in London and the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall in Liverpool. The practice has gained an international reputation for excellence in designing contemporary projects often in sensitive and historic environments. It came to public attention with the New Art Gallery in Walsall, a commission won in an international competition in 1995. 

From these origins in the visual arts, where sensitivity to the visitor’s experience and to context is required, the practice has extended its expertise and now works across Europe on a broad range of projects in the public and private realms. Recent clients include Tate Britain, the City of Lille, Bremer Landesbank and the SBB (Swiss National Railways). Caruso St John has assembled a wide range of work at a variety of scales and seeks to resist the trend of increased size and specialisation that dominates contemporary architecture.

Adam Caruso and Peter St John are closely involved in the design of all projects, 
with one of the partners attending client meetings and leading the project together 
with an architect project leader. The practice is international in its outlook and in its make up, with many of the staff, including the partners, involved in teaching in 
schools of architecture. The office of approximately 25 work in an open studio in a 
1930s factory building in East London which the practice converted to studio use for themselves. In 2010 a second office was opened by the practice in Zurich.