Tate St Ives

The site was a gasworks on the slope above Porthmeor Beach, and Evans & Shalev kept its geometry: the circular entrance court is the plan of the demolished gasholder, opened out as a loggia so that the sea is framed the moment you arrive. From the beach the gallery reads as a white rendered cliff of stepped and sliding volumes, closer to the massing of a Cornish fishing town than to a museum; from inside, the rooms climb and turn so that the route through them keeps coming back to windows onto Porthmeor. Built between 1988 and 1993 for Cornwall County Council and the Tate, it was designed to show the modern British artists who had worked in and around St Ives, in the light they painted in; the Tate had already run the town's Barbara Hepworth Museum since 1980. It succeeded so thoroughly that visitor numbers overwhelmed it, and between 2015 and 2017 Jamie Fobert Architects doubled the gallery space by burying new rooms in the hillside behind, leaving Eldred Evans's front elevation untouched.