Cheltenham

Cheltenham Museum addition
Cheltenham, England

sean lally design

Lifting the museum addition off the first floor opens the main plaza level in order to connect the streets on both sides of the site. Activities associated with a café, seating, and offices are controlled on this extended yet spatially conditioned area.

Residual and excess material energies used to define the activities on the plaza level are collected by a single void within the ceiling, funneled above into the building’s mass. Additional floor plates wrap around the central “lung” shape, holding galleries and exhibition halls.

Museum activities are organized along a spectrum of artificial environmental control. These range from the most closely controlled and least variable (exhibition spaces, exhibition preparation, galleries) to those with a broader bandwidth of variability (coffee shop, office desks and spaces, children’s studios).

This reordered spectrum re-informs the social and organizational patterns associated with how people use the museum, not by reinventing the specifications and requirements of the museum, but by reorganizing those same activities using the gradient and layered properties of material energies to define their programmatic requirements.