Sophie Bowness, who looks after the Barbara Hepworth Estate, introduces the new museum being built in Wakefield that will include an important collection of the artist's work:
A year into the construction of The Hepworth Wakefield, a new gallery designed by David Chipperfield Architects, and there are few right angles to be found (apart from windows and doors, that is). Rather than being an extra headache for Terry Hughes, project manager for the contractors Laing O’Rourke, he relishes the challenge.

The building, which is due to be completed next summer and to open in September 2010, has a very sculptural presence and takes maximum advantage of what is a spectacular headland site on the River Calder. As the architects (2007 RIBA Stirling prize-winners) have written:

The gallery building is formed from a conglomeration of differently sized trapezoidal blocks, responding to the scale and rooflines of the surrounding small scale industrial buildings. With water on two sides and visibility from all directions, the site – and therefore the building – has no front or back elevation.

It’s reminiscent of a 1909 Cubist Picasso of Horta de Ebro, with their clusters of houses of great solidity but divergent perspective. Now completed up to roof height, you get a real sense of The Hepworth’s distinctive roofscape and of the generous proportions of its rooms. The scale is impressive, 5,000 square metres in total, of which 2,000 is gallery space. This is a £26 million project, funded by a range of sources from the Heritage Lottery Fund to Arts Council England, Yorkshire Forward, English Partnerships, European Regional Development Fund and, especially, Wakefield Council – and there’s still money to raise.

One of the principal features of the permanent collection at Wakefield will be the work of the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, who was born in the city in 1903 and grew up there. Illuminations made a (highly-recommended) film, The Art of Barbara Hepworth, in her centenary year, with extensive footage shot at the nearby Yorkshire Sculpture Park. A new gift to the gallery from the Hepworth estate includes all the surviving working models from which her bronzes were cast. Made principally in plaster, with a number also in aluminium and wood, these prototypes range in size from works that can be held in the hand to monumental sculptures, including the Winged Figure, 1961-2, for John Lewis’ headquarters in Oxford Street.

The plasters have a special quality: they are the “original” sculptures on which Hepworth worked with her own hands and to scale. Displays of a sculptor’s working processes are rare, and at Wakefield the intention is to devote a room exclusively to these, using tools and materials from Hepworth’s studio, alongside archival photographs and film.

It’s a remarkable coincidence that Henry Moore was also born in the district, five miles away in Castleford and five years before Hepworth. So Wakefield can, with some justification, call itself the birthplace of modern sculpture in this country. Moore and Hepworth met first at Leeds School of Art and worked in close proximity in Hampstead in the 1930s.

Appropriately, one of Moore’s great elmwood carvings, the Reclining Figure of 1936, is at the core of the collection of Wakefield Art Gallery which is to be relocated to The Hepworth from the late Victorian town house in the city centre where it has been since 1934 (ten years after the gallery was founded). Just seven per cent of the collection was on view there. Four temporary exhibitions a year, opening with Eva Rothschild, will be an important aspect of the new gallery’s activities.

Concrete has negative associations for some, but in Chipperfield’s hands you may see it in a new light. For him it has an inherent solidity and presence. This is concrete of a particular and innovative kind, poured in-situ and with pigment added. The colour is hard to pin down, and apparently changes in different lights, but slate-grey with a hint of violet would be my description – it stands out.

The Hepworth is being built on a brown-field site on the Calder, previously inaccessible and unloved, and will open up access to the river. (An inquisitive heron visited on the day we were there; an otter is said to be another regular.) It has been the principal catalyst to the regeneration of the waterfront area, which includes a listed 18th century Navigation Warehouse. A new 50-metre long pedestrian bridge designed by Chipperfield with engineers Whitbybird, connecting the gallery to the centre of Wakefield, was lifted into place at the end of November.

Antony Gormley has recently written thoughtfully on the project:

This building is the result of a unique combination of two English spatial intellects. Barbara Hepworth’s work is characterised by an extreme refinement of form, sensibility of material and tenacity of purpose. The building that David Chipperfield has designed to house her work combines tough formal precision with a playful organicism that exactly complements her indomitable spirit as a pioneering woman sculptor.

People may even stop asking “Where’s Wakefield?”

Image courtesy David Chipperfield Architects/ Alessandro Milani