Description of project by Foster + Partners
With the donation in 1973 of their collection of ethnographic and twentieth-century art to the University of East Anglia, together with an endowment for a new building, Sir Robert and Lady Sainsbury sought to establish the Sainsbury Centre as an academic and social focus within the campus. The Sainsburys shared a belief that the study of art should be an informal, pleasurable experience, not bound by the traditional enclosure of object and viewer. As a result, the Sainsbury Centre is much more than a conventional gallery, where the emphasis is on art in isolation. Instead, it integrates a number of related activities within a single, light-filled space.
The building brought a new level of refinement to the practice’s early explorations into lightweight, flexible enclosures. Structural and service elements are contained within the double-layer walls and roof. Within this shell is a sequence of spaces that incorporates galleries, a reception area, the Faculty of Fine Art, senior common room and a restaurant. Full-height windows at each end open the space up to the surrounding landscape, while louvres line the interior to provide a highly flexible system for the control of natural and artificial light. Large enough to display the Sainsburys’ extraordinary collection, yet designed to be intimate and inviting, the main gallery – or ‘living area’ – evokes the spirit of the collection’s originally domestic setting.
A new gift from the Sainsburys in 1988 allowed the building to be extended to provide space for the display of the reserve collection, together with curatorial and conservation facilities and a space for exhibitions and conferences, giving the centre greater flexibility in its programming. The new wing extends the building below ground level, exploiting the contours of the site to emerge in the form of a glazed crescent incised in the landscape. In 2006 a further programme of improvements was completed, which provides an internal link between the main and Crescent Wing galleries, a new education centre, additional display space, and improved shop, café and other visitor amenities.
Norman Foster is considered by many to be the most prominent architect in Britain. He won the 1999 Pritzker Architecture Prize and the 2009 Príncipe de Asturias de las Artes Prize.
Lord Foster rebuilt the Reichstag as a new German Parliament in Berlin and designed a contemporary Great Court for the British Museum. He linked St. Paul's Cathedral to the Tate Modern with the Millennium Bridge, a steel footbridge across the Thames. He designed the Hearst Corporation Building in Manhattan, at 57th Street and Eighth Avenue.
He was born in Manchester, England, in 1935. Among his firm’s many other projects are London’s City Hall, the Bilbao Metro in Spain, the Canary Wharf Underground Station in London and the renovated courtyard of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery in Washington.
In the 1970s, Lord Foster was one of the most visible practitioners of high-tech architecture that fetishized machine culture. His triumphant 1986 Hong Kong and Shanghai bank building, conceived as a kit-of-parts plugged into a towering steel frame, was capitalism's answer to the populist Pompidou Center in Paris.
Nicolai Ouroussoff, The Times’s architecture critic, has written that although Lord Foster’s work has become sleeker and more predictable in recent years, his forms are always driven by an internal structural logic, and they treat their surroundings with a refreshing bluntness.
Awarded the Prince of Asturias of the Arts 2009.
