Building for the arts
muf have established a design sensibility for the arts, whereby the building actively mediates between content and context to create a dynamic, experiential relationship between the viewer and the viewed; the interior and the exterior.
muf are able to maximise budgets, identify and source gorgeous materials, develo unique applications for them and to integrate low tech./ high innovation environmental ans structural engineering into design. muf have experience of achieving planning permission in sensitive situations
Museum of Women's Art
Feasibility study funded by Arts Council of England
The study was constructed as a conceptual design model that both tested and refined the ambition of the client. The study exposed and exceeded the paradox of revealing a hidden cannon of work only to enclose it again in another hermetic institution. The model describes strategies and spatial arrangements to make connections and juxtapositions, both actual and visual, that allow for a curation of the museum whereby the social, political and historic conditions that have marginalised women in art history can be disclosed.
Walsall Art Gallery
Short listed
Competition scheme
The scheme is both a proposal for a building and a framework to negotiate the process of design refinement. The design is predicated in the limits of the building envelope and the potential to curate a relationship between the interior of the building and the surrounding town; between the exhibit and the viewer; the historic collection and contemporary art practice and between the adult and the child. Elevations, plans and sections articulate the controlled penetration of art into the street and the street into the place of art. Value judgements of territory, modesty and exhibition dictate levels of opacity, transparency and translucency.
Museum Pavillion
Client St Albans City and District Council
Budget £700,000
A pavillion to house an insitu Roman mosaic located in a municipal park. The building is designed to make apparent the relationships between the remains of the invisible city beneath the grass, the current activities in the park and the contemporary town of St albans. The material construction of the facade uses oyster shell aggregate to reintroduce Roman building materials; the tilted mirror soffit gives glimpsed views both from outside and inside the building and the planted roof relates the structure to the surrounding park. The exterior landscape integrates interpretation and creates new places to sit. muf worked with the client to achieve scheduled monument constent in a highly sensitive site.