The charming harbour town of Norwegian origin called Stromness is the result of two dominant building types huddled together into a weather worn hand. The ends of long chimneyless pitched roof sheds made of different materials upon dry stone bases like stubby fingers in the water and, by road, two storey houses placed either parallel or perpendicular, their chimneys flush to windowless gable ends.

This is an insistent and dogged morphology, a huddled together architecture that reminds me both of the position espoused in the built work and writings of Aldo Rossi and the responsively loose and nuanced buildings of the Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza whose work transformed these typologies into more expressive and freely open compositions. One might characterise the exterior expression of the project by Edinburgh practice Reiach and Hall - to extend the Pier Arts Centre with a refurbished building on the street and a new one facing the sea - as located somewhere between these two canons and, as such, offering a powerful regional exemplar.

The original Pier Arts collection remains in its low-lying paralleliped of random rubble like a knarled piece of driftwood with knots for windows. Each of the two floors of this hollowed out log is a gentle inflecting room to room experience where the walls that define each room are only partly reconstructed allowing a sense of the whole. Reiach and Hall have adopted a strategy of careful restoration with quiet alterations, to a floor tile grid here, or a light fitting there.

The new building is more striking. ‘Charred’ black in colour it is parallel to the old, set further back from the sea, wider and higher, but otherwise markedly similar in form to its neighbours. It’s roof and walls are in the same detail, but in fact the south face has a papery like surface of blackened Zinc with thin vertical shallow crease-joints whilst the north side has vertical ribbed beams with all glass infill strips. By maintaining a flush condition to the harbour façade, between glass and cladding, the continuity of the skin of the building and thereby the overall archetypal form of a shed is sustained. On the street building the front façade treatment has the emotive presence of a face with a parti that relies on continuity of surface and deeply restrained tectonic. This is handled with assurance and skill.

Leaving the gallery to visit Melsetter House, William Lethaby’s arts and crafts masterpiece on the Island of Hoy, I was impressed with the contemporary feel of the spaces. In particular how the Orkney light is manipulated and the way every detail contributes to the whole. Returning the next day to the gallery I met two artists, Ragna Robertsdottir and Alan Johnston, both of whom were enthusing over the new spaces of the new gallery as they christened them with their own works.

The new building is unquestionably a fine addition to the townscape of Stromness. From the harbour side the new building is an archetype with added complexity. The project sets up an ambiguity between building structure and skin, absorbing the vernacular of the ferry boats and bridges with the more familiar forms of the town. I know that the external expression of architecture, whether urban or rural, has the ability to generate great influence unconsciously over time. As one of the most interesting practices in Scotland, Reiach and Hall have laid out an example of a way of proceeding that will have some significance in time to come.

Jonathan Woolf

ISBN 978 0 9556148 0 4

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