In 1993, a new building opened in St Ives whose business was hard to identify. Where once there had been a gasworks facing Porthmeor Beach, now there was an ebullient double-height rotunda,cheap real jordans, which looked something like the entrance to a 1930s cinema. Inside was amphitheatre-style seating made in the local stone.


One floor up,http://users.atw.hu/promotionscorp/index.php?site=forum_topic&topic=16443cheapjordanshoesfreeshipping.com/bolg, a curved corridor wrapped round it. This was the new Tate St Ives, a building designed by the local partnership of David Shalev and Eldred Evans, who had taken the region by storm in 1984 with their blusteringly postmodern Truro law courts.


Now, 24 years on, another building has appeared to its right,cheap air jordans, perched above the beach – a pavilion that emerges from the hill,jordan shoes, clad in shimmering shiplap ceramic tiles that turn green and blue under rapidly changing Cornish skies.









Architect Jamie Fobert

Credit: Guy Martin







This is the latest extension to Tate St Ives, by Jamie Fobert Architects, which opens to the public on 14 October. The two buildings, which have been seamlessly woven together inside the hill, have doubled the available exhibition space.


Where before visitors coming for a full-on experience of the famous St Ives School often left feeling let down – where was the local work they’d come to see? The Bernard Leach pots, the dazzling Patrick Heron paintings? – today in the original galleries hangs the full complement of Alfred Wallis seascapes, Ben Nicholson abstracts, Barbara Hepworth sculptures and Peter Lanyon landscapes.


Work by international St Ives-influenced names, such as the Dutchman Piet Mondrian, will appear too.









Shiplap ceramic tiles help the building fit into its surroundings, while also catching the Cornish light

Credit: Guy Martin







At the end of this original enfilade of rooms, intimate galleries built to service a previous era of daintier art, visitors now enter Fobert’s spacious new addition. Connecting spaces lined with textured panelling give way to a square arch lined with limed oak that leads to a 483msq, column-free gallery washed with the inimitable blue light that brought artists to St Ives in the first place.




"That was a science project," says Jamie Fobert, pointing up to the six evenly distributed skylights. "We worked with the engineers for a couple of years to get the amount of light right."


When we go outside, they jut out of the ground by several metres, and Fobert has created a landscape of Cornish stone around them. To make the new gallery connect to the old, Fobert excavated right into the hill; its roof a part of the landscape.


"It was important to hide away much of the building," he says. "This is a community of 10,000. The last thing they needed was another Guggenheim, a big flashy icon at the edge of their town." Canadian Fobert set up his own practice in London in 1996,http://oforyou.com/jforum/posts/list/0/26939.page#30654cheapjordanshoesfreeshipping.com/bolg, after cutting his teeth in the studio of David Chipperfield.


He has won multiple awards for a series of ingenious individual houses, and created retail environments for a long list of fabulous names including Versace and Givenchy. But St Ives is his biggest step so far, and he certainly knows a thing or two about the community he is serving here.









Rebecca Warren’s bronze works will dominate the reopening

Credit: Rebecca Warren Los Hadeans III 2017 ? Rebecca Warren, Courtesy Maureen Paley, London, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin







As we walk up and down the winding streets, with their fishermen’s cottages and fudge shops (surely the world’s highest concentration per capita), local people stop to ask him how things are going. The opening is hotly anticipated. The Tate is important to the local economy and to the town’s identity.


"The original building is very dear to people here. I hope they get to like mine as much," says the architect, for whom the project has been a long time coming.


Jamie Fobert Architects first won the competition to design the extension to Tate St Ives in 2005, with a scheme that stood proudly above ground and caused a lot of consternation about the loss of parking spaces in Barnoon car park.


"I still have a 'Save Barnoon' T-shirt," laughs Fobert. Then, following the acquisition by Cornwall Council of the land where Fobert’s excavation eventually took place, a new competition was launched. "The delay was useful in the end," says Nicholas Serota, director of Tate from 1988 until this summer.


"Things had changed. We realised we needed a space where many different art forms could take place – film, video, performance and so on. The original building already offered spectacular views. We didn’t need any more of those.


"In the ’70s and ’80s, there was a big move by architects to open up the art institution, to make the insides visible. We’ve moved on from that. It’s more about the beautiful gallery space inside the building."









Inside the new extension

Credit: Guy Martin







Fobert, undeterred, won the competition again in 2012 – his buried-below-ground scheme actually increasing the number of spaces in the car park, to local delight (parking is a red-hot issue in St Ives). Corners of Fobert’s original pavilion have been chamfered away to ensure houses on top of the hill keep their sea views.


"Some architects come up with a vision first and make it work second," says Fobert, "but I prefer to solve the practical things first and the architecture comes later."


Mark Osterfield, Tate St Ives’ executive director (also a trained ballet dancer and a fine artist) agrees. The brief, he says, included the large exhibition space, educational facilities, and a way to get huge pieces of work in and out of the building.









Work by Barbara Hepworth

Credit: Barbara Hepworth Curved Form (Trevalgan) 1956 ? Bowness







"Jamie laid everything out and then jigsawed all the parts together. That’s when the form emerges and you get a unique set of spaces." Inside, the main gallery’s ceiling is a grid of pale grey concrete beams – reminiscent of those in the local sail lofts – which for all their lightness can carry the weight of four double-decker buses.


The floor is concrete, with gritty inclusions of aggregate – "I wanted it to feel beachy," says Fobert. "One of the first things Nick Serota said to me was, 'Never forget that this is Cornwall.'" For the opening, it will be filled with the work of Rebecca Warren, the 52-year-old British sculptor shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2006.









Patrick Heron artwork

Credit: Patrick Heron Azalea Garden: May 1956 1956 ? The estate of Patrick Heron







Fobert was thrilled to find out she would be first in – "Her work is so alive," he says of her animated semi-abstract bronze figures – and that she wanted to make full use of his carefully precise daylight. Serota, meanwhile, approves the connection that Warren makes with Barbara Hepworth, the town’s most famous female artist, whose own sculpture garden is just up the road.


"Hepworth feels the landscape, and refers back to the mythic form, the obelisk, [while] Rebecca Warren is into Robert Crumb and comics and the quirks of the human body. But both of them work with the human figure."


Warren’s new work comes under the title All That Heaven Allows, after the Technicolor 1955 melodrama by Douglas Sirk, in which a put-upon Jane Wyman falls in love with a rugged gardener played (quite convincingly, considering everything about the movie is desperately camp) by Rock Hudson in a checked shirt.











A Ben Nicholson piece

Credit: Ben Nicholson 1924 (first abstract painting, Chelsea) c.1923–4 ? Angela Verren Taunt 2017. All rights reserved, DACS







Warren’s figures, standing three metres high, are streaked with the candy colours of the film. Subsequent shows will feature the 20th-century artist Patrick Heron and a look at Virginia Woolf’s connection to St Ives (the lighthouse that inspired her 1927 novel To the Lighthouse can be found here).


Fobert remarks that he can’t get away from the Bloomsbury set – he’s also working at Charleston, their Sussex playground, making barn-like buildings in concrete and Corten steel to house new gallery spaces and the archive. But before that’s completed in the spring of next year, he’ll be celebrating the opening of the Tate St Ives, wearing his "Save Barnoon" T-shirt under his suit.


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It so wasn't meant to be like this. After a decade scrumming it in big cities – six years in London, four in New Delhi – moving to Golden Bay in the garden of New Zealand was supposed to be a dream existence.
The idea was to take our young family from a sooty suburb in New Delhi (pop. 20 million) to the tiny rural town of Takaka (pop. 1,182) on the South Island and prove there really was more to life than career ladders, commuting and dropping the kids at daycare. (I'm still haunted by the London friend who said he didn't know what his son liked to eat because he "usually ate at nursery".)

So while our metropolitan mates were spinning like fretful mice in their wheels, we aspired to a broader view of the world – earning much less (just enough to get by) but enjoying ourselves far more. After all, it doesn't cost anything to walk on the beach or swim in the sea and, if you know where to look, there are plenty of free lunches to be had – fish from the ocean and fresh veggies from the garden.
If we were a little smug, it was only because we thought we were daring to be different.
Perhaps too different. Golden Bay has always attracted its fair share of refugees from reality. In the 19th century it was gold rushers, in the Sixties the first hippies, in the Nineties the "end of the world is nigh" millennium crowd and, most recently, a species of green-minded folk looking for a quiet place to grow vegetables while the world sleepwalks into ecological Armageddon.
Turning back: Peter Foster with his wife Clare and children, from left, Lila, Billy and Scarlett in Takaka, New Zealand Photo: Tim Cuff
It is, quite literally, the end of the earth (which was the point) but at times during the past year, standing on the beautiful beach at the bottom of our garden, I did start to wonder if I might topple off without anybody actually noticing. Being awake while the rest of the world is asleep is not healthy for lifelong news junkies.
It's deeply annoying to admit it, but the metro-mate naysayers (smug themselves, we thought) have been proved correct. "You'll go bonkers in a week," they said. They were only half-right. It took me at least two. Growing the perfect runner bean and baking dates scones have their undeniable satisfactions, as does catching your red snapper at sunset and pounding the deserted windswept beaches.
But there is a limit. And now, I'm faintly ashamed to say, I have discovered it. So while it's wonderful for young children to have their father around all day, a father's not much use if he's become a lunatic lark-slayer.



Whisper it softly, but bliss is, well – I'll say it straight out – boring as hell.




More seriously, I hope they will forgive me for taking them back to a high-rise city and they'll adjust again to the long hours ahead of dad disappearing into his office. No doubt there's a balance out there – somewhere – but this year I didn't find it.
None of which is to sa...r-long stay in Golden Bay. Life turned out exactly as billed, but in the end it just felt different from how I'd hoped it would. We've made good friends and grown stronger as a family, learning plenty of new things about each other – good and not so good – and gained a healthily broad perspective on life. I'll never forget the daily walks on the beach, the afternoons foraging and exploring and the evenings fishing off the rocks. Each and every experience,cheap jordans for sale, even the skylarks on the school run, has been wonderful, magical – and yet… and yet.
'Whisper it softly, but bliss is, well - I'll say it straight out - boring as hell'&nbsp,cheap jordans; Photo: Tim Cuff
Whisper it softly, but bliss is, well – I'll say it straight out – boring as hell. Or should that be boring as heaven? After a year in the pristine seclusion of Golden Bay tending the veg plot, I crave the infernal stink of the big city and the juice-inducing competition of the rat race.
If that's a measure of my own shortcomings as a human being,cheap authentic jordans, then so be it, but I'm afraid Julian Barnes had heaven bang on in the sublime climax of A History of the World in 10? Chapters when his narrator wakes from a dream to find himself "on the other side".
At first everything is gratifyingly brilliant.
Breakfast is so perfect he eats it again for lunch and dinner, in between shooting 18 around every golf course in the world; winning a Grand Slam at tennis and scoring a blistering but elegant 750 not out against Australia at Lord's.
But in the end,cheap jordans free shipping,http://power-shoot.cba.pl/index.php?site=forum_topic&topic=11267cheapjordanshoesfreeshipping.com/bolg, living his dream life is a strangely empty experience. "Why do we have these dreams of Heaven?" he asks his celestial shrink. And she replies. "Perhaps,cheap jordan shoes, because you need them… because you can't get by without the dream. It's nothing to be ashamed of. It seems quite normal to me. Though I suppose if you knew about Heaven beforehand, you might not ask for it."