This idea of landscape remains a constant influence in our work. We explore this open territory in all our buildings and projects. The Scottish landscape is prone to be viewed in a romantic picturesque way, merely useful for attracting tourists. The visible landscape has been shaped and will continue to be shaped by people and their attitude to it. Architecture likewise is all too often reduced to the visually scenic, simply reinforcing a superficial populist view of Scotland. We are concerned both by the picturesque romanticism of much mediocre building and paradoxically also by the architect as architect, a feted entertainer performing conjuring tricks for the cognoscenti with a weary box of visual effects.

Our affinity towards artists and their practice stems from both collaborative works, most notably Alan Johnston, and actual arts projects. Small gallery conversions for the Collective Gallery and Stills Gallery in Edinburgh’s Cockburn Street developed ideas of movement and ambiguity. The gallery spaces themselves were conceived of as being architecturally neutral. Alan Johnston eloquently explores these projects in his text Crystalline Reflections³. Our renovation of Inverleith House Gallery within the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh again required us to remove ourselves as architects from the scene and render the spaces void of artifice. Stills Gallery was seen as apart from the city, an introverted space, while in contrast the Collective Gallery engaged directly with the street. Inverleith House was an entirely different prospect, a fine Georgian House set within a hortus botannicus. The gallery spaces enjoy open views into this enlightened landscape. A recent unrealised project was for the Peacock Visual Arts in Aberdeen. An ephemeral pavilion was imagined in the historic Castlegate, closing the relentless line of Union Street.

Our most enduring and important collaborative work is with Alan Johnston. It involved the creation and running of a small space for art. It is embedded in the basement of our offices. The sleeper gallery is a form of hospitality, a recognition of ideas. The notion that making connections is in fact a form of artistic practice is new territory for us as architects. Sleeper is a vehicle for an extended conversation with a circle of artists. Alan on his global peregrinations offers the space as a token of generosity to artists he meets and respects.

As well as sleeper we have enjoyed a number of associations with Alan Johnson on major building projects including a dramatic polished aluminium installation within Evolution House on Edinburgh’s Westport, originally designed as an office block it is now an extension to the Edinburgh College of Art. A further collaboration is nearing completion on the edge of Glasgow, the cancer research facility for The Beatson Institute has allowed us to explore the entire façade as a joint work.

The poet Thomas A Clark is also a quiet and continuing influence in our work. We collaborated on a text-based piece for a white granite façade on a research building within the Edinburgh Technopole which is set within a designed country estate below the Pentland Hills. Fold of Granite was at once descriptive and also an exploration of the essence of architectural form. Thomas A Clark is currently leading a group of artists in an extremely significant collaboration with us on a major healthcare project at Stobhill in Glasgow.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The brilliant son of Stromness, George MacKay Brown, wrote about a geographically very local and particular place. Yet through the lucidity, elegance and honesty of his words he spoke to an audience that was not defined by Orcadian boundaries. It was apparent from our first contact with Orkney that here was a community that had deep connection to the landscape and a genuine interest in what lies beyond their horizon.

The town of Stromness has a unique foreshore characterised by small stone piers that describe the high and low water marks along the northern edge of the protected Hamnavoe inlet. It is an incomparable edge of pier and building, a hesitant margin between land and sea. The Pier Arts Centre occupies a strategic position within this fringe, adjacent to the Pier Head, the focal point of arrival in Stromness and the beginning of its remarkable linear urban development along the Hamnavoe.

The Pier Arts Centre project is a combination of permanent gallery space for the collection and new temporary galleries. The commission involved the complete refurbishment of the historic pier buildings, along with a new gallery structure. The permanent galleries contain a collection of British contemporary art of international status. The remarkable core of the collection stems from the private collection of the PAC’s founder, Margaret Gardiner 1904-2005.

We understand buildings to be made up of rooms, rooms that have different characteristics and different atmospheres. We like to think in terms of these characteristics, tall rooms, long low rooms with views out to the town or to the sea, quiet rooms, intimate rooms and so on. The Pier Gallery in effect already had a collection of very fine rooms, realised through the original and beautiful conversion done in the late 1970’s by Kate Heron and Axel Burrough. Although we had to reduce these buildings back to their basic structure to then bring the fabric and services up to the requirements of a 21st century museum we were determined to carefully reinstate the original interiors. We viewed these rooms as being part of this unique collection.

The plan of the building is in effect three separate but connected elements: a building that is part of Stomness’s main street, Victoria Street and two parallel buildings that extend from the street towards the Hamnavoe. The street building we called the meeting house contains entry, administration, library and meeting rooms along with an artists studio and flat. The original Pier building, the strong house, contains the collection while the new building, the black house, contains temporary gallery space along with back of house facilities and in the attic storey the archive and collection storage.

The form of the new building adopts a familiar guise; a simple pitched roof recalls a traditional waterfront warehouse. Its familiarity however is transformed and undermined through a façade that shifts from solid to void; black patinated zinc ribs alternate with translucent glass infills. Our intention was to realise a building that is grounded in its location yet through a lightness of touch escapes the Medusa effect of the prevalent stone culture. The resulting building and its construction is not traditional yet it has a resonance with the place.

Two artists, who both showed in sleeper during the early design work for the Pier, influenced our thinking. Ragna Robertsdottir, from Iceland, brought a transluscent beauty both within herself and her work, a veil of volcanic particles whose density varied as the viewer moved around the room. Ragna’s installation in sleeper clarified an idea for a façade that alters as the viewer moves. The glazed façade describes the linear circulation strategy that connects all three buildings while exposing a skeletal structure. The spacing of the ribs recalls the original gallery’s rafters. Roger Ackling reinforced the idea suggested by Robertsdottir’s installation. His work involves the burning of delicate lines into a found piece of wood. Through his work we saw how the new building could be indelibly etched into the existing fabric of the town. The new building asserts its presence without undermining the original pier building. When viewed gable on the new building is solid but begins to melt as the viewer moves allowing it to fade as the original pier building comes into view.

Freud in his essay on The Uncanny, 1919, says ‘‘it may be true that the uncanny is something which is secretly familiar which has undergone repression and then returned from it and that everything that is uncanny fulfils this condition.’’

The form of the new building is familiar yet it takes on the black vestment of a dignified and valued elder. While giving a clue that this is a cultural building it also has a quality that is ambivalent and melancholic. The softness of the black patinated zinc cladding has an air of absence about it, a sense of Neil Gunn’s horror vacui⁴, or fear of vacant spaces.

The meeting house onto Victoria Street is seen as the antithesis of the black house, all is white. Again this expression is recognisable, the whitewashing of vernacular buildings is very familiar yet it too has an uncanny air about it. The streets of Stromness are either stone or dull coloured render, the whiteness of the Pier Arts Centre has a hint of the spectre. Internally the spaces are seen as a backdrop to the art. The materials and surfaces are bleached or translucent. Within these muted spaces there are moments of clarity with clear views out to the Hamnavoe, a connection to the northern landscape.

The culture we have experienced in the North is suited to our need to quietly and thoroughly understand a situation and work with it to create buildings that are not only useful but also poetic.

Neil Gillespie

ISBN 978 0 9556148 0 4

www.sleeper1.com