Charleston Museum – Entry by Dow Jones Architects

Charleston has existed as a group of agricultural buildings for at least the last 500 years. Its inhabitation by the Bloomsbury Group for most of the last 100 years has marked it as an extraordinary place, telling the story of the lives of a group of artists in the most direct and intimate way.

Our proposal adapts the buildings surrounding the farmhouse to make new spaces for the creation and display of art, continuing the pattern of use started by the Bloomsbury Group.

We make buildings which are both calm and generous and which, through careful consideration of place, draw your attention to situations and experiences. We liken this to the description of poetry by Paul Roche, close friend of Duncan Grant, as ‘awareness heightened’. In ‘Contemporary Poets’ he writes, “It is a way of apprehending the intensity of being. I try to recreate experience more intensely, reduce it to a luminous whole, render intuitive the meaning and metaphysics of the universe”. The buildings we are proposing weave into the fabric of Charleston, responding to the place both culturally and topographically, and provide the context for art, not the art itself.

Designer: Dow Jones Architects, Location: East Sussex, England, UK, Image Credits: © Dow Jones Architects, Information: Source