Issue 95 - February 1997

What they say about the Museum of River and Rowing

"The architecture is established in the choice of traditional pitched-roof forms that recall the wooden barns of Oxfordshire, the riverside boat houses at Henley, and the temporary tents erected to house the boats and spectators at Henley Regatta. This formal decision also proved to be successful in helping the design fit into the planning constraints of a sensitive, conservative and historic town."

Hugh Pearman in the Sunday Times:

"Almost no other subject [rowing and river life] carries such sentimental associations for southern Englanders - we cannot delete Kenneth Graham's anthropomorphic furry class warriors from our consciousness. The triumph of Chipperfield's museum building is, first, that it is, as a container, thoroughly unsentimental; and, secondly, that it shows that compromise need not craven. It is possible to build a modern building at the very node point of hands-off-my-patch Nimbyland. And yes, it fits in, to the point of vanishing."

Marcus Filed in Blueprint:

"David Chipperfield has dragged a Trojan horse up to the gates of a quintessential English town and tethered it there. This is how he likes to think of his newly completed River and Rowing Museum at Henley-on-Thames, a friendly oak-clad building which conceals a modest attack on the bourgeois sensibilities of middle England."

Jessica Cargill Thompson in Building:

"Barefaced use of non-traditional materials - exposed concrete, steel and glass - and modernist forms might be expected to raise an eyebrow. Its architect, David Chipperfield, has got away with it by combining its natural leanings towards modernism with the traditional building forms of the south of England to produce a curious hybrid that is half Miesian glass box, half oak-panelled rustic barn."

© Copyright REGATTA OnLine, 1997.