The Weston is a £3.6 million new gallery, shop and café for the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Built on a the site of a former quarry within the Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s 18th-century Bretton Estate, The Weston has been designed to carefully sit within this historic landscape and have a minimal impact on its surroundings.

Inspired by land art works by Michael Heizer and Robert Morris, the building creates a clear threshold as both an entrance and a destination extending the visitor experience to the east of the 200 hectare park. Its low profile protects it from the motorway and forms a sheltered, sunken terrace with views across the park towards the Lower Lake and Bretton Hall.

To build within a sculpture park naturally provokes questions about the relationship between architecture and sculpture. The Weston was an opportunity to explore this, drawing from sculpture for form, space and scale.

Henry Moore

the site forms part of the north eastern boundary to the park, tracing a parallel line to the M1 and defined by an earth bank and fence line. This dual quality of the site offered great opportunity, at once an edge condition, but then opening up dramatically to the expanse of landscape to the west, cascading down to Lower Lake with views on towards Bretton Hall. The site therefore determined strong axis, the north-south boundary condition, and east-west approach.

The land artwork Observatory by Robert Morris similarly dealt with embanking, fashioning the ground into two concentric circles of mounded earth with four entrances in the outer circle, aligning with the sunrise on the equinoxes; a. A modern-day Stone Henge. We wanted to generate similar strong axis, a primary opening carved through the wall, creating a deep threshold, with the ground sloping gentle down towards the opening

Constructed from layered, pigmented concrete which evokes the strata of the site’s sandstone bedrock, the building emerges from the ground of the former quarry and is defined by a concrete saw-tooth roof. A scalloped fibreglass crown creates a modest, glowing beacon in the landscape at night.

Within the walls of the gallery are 10,000 unfired clay bricks which provide a pioneering low-energy environmental control system maintaining the gallery’s internal conditions while also reducing the need for air conditioning.

The new gallery, which will showcase a changing programme of temporary exhibitions, features fair-faced concrete walls and is lit from above by a series of roof lights positioned within the concrete structure.

Constructed from a Douglas Fir timber frame, the café space contrasts with the mass of the concrete of the gallery and has a more homely and inviting feel with a wood burning stove and furniture specifically chosen to give a more domestic atmosphere, creating a comfortable space to look outwards.

To celebrate the opening of The Weston, we published a short collection of written and visual essays on our journey to realise this special project. The book includes contributions from Founding and Executive Director Peter Murray, Director of Programme Clare Lilley and artist Richard Wentworth.