The Lightbox Gallery

Marks Barfield Architects’ Lightbox Gallery sits in a triangular sliver of land sandwiched between the Basingstoke canal and a 5 -lane highway.

Square aluminium cladding panels step across the buildings façade in a diagonal pattern, further emphasised by the use of five different cladding bands in shades of silver and gold. Softer timber cladding is used away from the roadside and towards the gallery’s garden space.

The gallery’s entrance is located at an intersection of the highway and leads to a top-lit atrium providing principal circulation and orientation. The atrium acts as a buffer zone to the noise of the road and as an extension of the gallery space. At ground floor level the atrium is glazed with dichroic striped glass which provides some shading whilst also creating colourful patterns on the atrium floor.

Adjacent to the gallery building, a south-westerly facing garden has been created in the narrow end of the site orientated to the canal. Noise and pollution from the neighbouring highway is deflected away from the garden by a three metre high gabion wall.