River & Rowing Museum Henley-on-Thames

Description

The very earliest sketches for the museum at Henley-on-Thames were inspired by local river boathouses and the traditional wooden barns of Oxfordshire - a simple and clear architectural idea that could easily be understood in context to its immediate neighbours. Looking at the completed building today, it is a carefully crafted manifestation of these first sketches, with long, parallel, oak-clad forms and steeply pitched lead-coated roofs. It is clearly a modern building, but one that resonates at the same time with a vernacular architectural past.Sitting in water meadows on the south bank of the Thames, close to Henley’s town centre, the museum houses a significant collection of rowing boats, cataloguing the history of the sport, the River Thames, and the town of Henley. Considered in two parts, the museum is made up of a transparent and open entry floor space (containing public areas and elevated off the ground because of the periodic flooding of the river) and a sequence of first floor galleries, enclosed and lit from skylights above.Each gabled boat hall has direct external access doors at ground floor level so as to allow the hulls of the eights and single-skull boats to be brought in and displayed. The whole of these upper spaces is clad with untreated green oak timber - a wood that hardens and effectively weathers with age - so as to further align the building with a local vernacular. In this way, by carefully negotiating the conservative aesthetic sensibilities of rural England, the River and Rowing Museum merges figure and abstraction, appearing behind its screen of poplars to reveal both convention and invention.(Description provided by David Chipperfield Architects)