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We were short-listed with another five practices in an international competition to prepare designs for the Turner Centre in Margate.

Turners paintings of Margate show a blurring together of cliffs and stuccoed buildings under huge skies. This merging of cliff wall and built form is evident along the sea front where buildings seem to imitate the scale and mass of the chalk bluffs. We were interested in this area where architecture and landscape begin to share qualities, becoming like each other.

Our design is made from soft vulnerable chalk and tough black flint that is formed within the chalk. The black and white polar opposition of dense flint pebbles and delicate massive chalk, one born out of the other, has a special pleasure for us.

Our proposal was for the art gallery to be made within massive cool inert chalk blocks. The chalk blocks would be protected form the sea by a glass shield held onto the chalk by steel pins resembling rock climber’s pitons. The simple chalk blocks were then set against a long flint wall which takes it’s shape from the edge of the town. This wall contains the accommodation associated with the business of the gallery. A series of paths and squares knit into the surrounding community and lead to the foyer of the building, a gorge between the flint wall and the chalk boxes. From here visitors could ascend to the galleries that we imagined as empty abstract landscapes. The chalk walls and floor were the permanent ground and the ceiling would be like the sky and clouds, capable of endless change.