The University of East Anglia’s Norwich campus is a home to a strange and varied mix of buildings. Much of it is brutalist in nature, with unforgiving concrete buildings forming an almost unbroken wall stretching from one end of the campus to the other.

It’s a strange place to spend a Saturday afternoon if you’re not a student, but we were in the city and wanted to check out the famed Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, the free gallery and museum set up by beneficiary Sir Robert Sainsbury, one time chairman of the supermarket that took his family name.

It’s worth a trip for the building alone. An early Foster creation, you can see its influence on later projects like Stansted and Chek Lap Kok airports, with a grand, gently-arched roof curving gracefully over a cavernous, yet still strangely intimate interior.

There are no visible supports to break up the gallery, yet somehow the grandeur of the place does nothing to belittle the exhibits within. You could rightly expect that 4000 year old masks, and tiny statuettes no larger than your thumbnail would be lost in such a building, but they’re not. That’s thanks, in part, to clever use of temporary dividers and display boards that break up the space into manageable parts.

Entry to the gallery, which brings the University a return of between £1m and £1.5m each year, is free, and the coffee shop - an essential part of any gallery visit - is both well stocked and surprisingly cheap.

The only disappointment was that the building itself, so impressive in person, is very difficult to photograph from the outside. The stark, unapologetic ends are perhaps the most interesting parts. Exposing the roof and wall supports, they make it look like the building is merely a chopped-out section of a larger whole.

Even that, though, doesn’t hint at how impressive a structure it is, how ahead of its time it must have been, how important it was as a harbinger of future British architecture, and how forward-thinking and brave Sir and Lady Sainsbury were to have commissioned such a radical design when they were already well into old age.

Technorati Tags:
museum, norfolk, norwich, gallery, sainsburys

1. Creative Party
   It was raining so I very nearly didn't go to the Creative party this evening. It stopped, though, so I wandered with Dylan to Goodge...
   
   
2. Late night opening at the British Museum
   Great Court at the British Museum I used to be a once-a-week regular at the British Museum - so much so that I got...
   
   
3. Berlin
   This was my fourth trip to Berlin, I think, but it was easily the best. It was cold, and as we came in to land...