Quad 19.9.08 final as printed

8/7/2019 Quad 19.9.08 final as printed

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UADTHE CRAFTING OF AN ARTS BUILDING



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The story related in this booklet explores animportant role in making projects like QUADemerge and y. Derby, a city facing a complexand uncertain future, has decided to support thecomplex process of developing a new arts andmedia organisation and to invest in a ne newmedia and cultural building. To do this successfullyrequires vision, leadership and organisationalcapacity to be in place from the outset - wellbefore the long term governance, managementand programming teams are recruited.

Getting the best balance between place, peopleand public spaces for the arts and reconciling themultiplicity of demands from interest groups,stakeholders and investors and other professionalsrequires an interlocking set of political, creativeand management skills. We believe that theseskills - and the kind of experience we bring toour clients - are essential ingredients in craftingprojects like QUAD.

David PowellSeptember 2008

David Powell Associates Ltd acted as the Development Director forQUAD for Derby City Council between 2004 to the project’s openingin September 2008.

Photograph by George Harris



QUAD is a new centre for artand lm, perfectly placed,plumb in the centre ofDerby. Cleverly designed toexpand as it gets higher, onthe inside it reveals far morespace than its neat footprintsuggests. Even as a buildingsite in its frenetic last stagesof work, it had a cheerfuland inviting presence. QUAD,a new organisation and itsnew building, opened inSeptember 2008.

For the modest £11.2 million itcost to build, QUAD is beautifullyequipped. It delivers a rst class andfully secure and environmentallycontrolled art gallery, two excellentcinemas, another large exible space(for art, lm or talks), a state-of-the-art BFI-linked mediatheque anda superb digital arts lab open to allfor hands-on learning. There is alsoan ofce space where small creativeorganisations can base themselves,and a spacious entrance area with awelcoming café.

The ambition expressed in thebuilding is reected in its impressiveopening programme of exhibitions.The rst installation in the galleryis by Jane and Louise Wilson, andsubsequent shows include a surveyof the work of the late Ian Breakwell– the other great artist from Derby,apart from Joseph Wright – and anexhibition of new work from China.

In the way one space links toanother, QUAD creates every possibleopportunity for users to criss-crossbetween top-level contemporaryart, art-house lm screenings,individual lm research and a wealth

of practical creative activity. It looksreally accessible, really high quality,and really good fun. Derby hasstaked its claim in the visual arts witha spirited and original venture.4 5



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London-basedconsultancy, David PowellAssociates (DPA), anorganisation working inthe complex interfacebetween place, peopleand culture.

The QUAD project began some ten years agowhen Derby City Council was scratching its headover a future for its Assembly Rooms, a heavilyintractable 1970s building designed by HughCasson to replace the eighteenth century original,destroyed by re. It had been rebuilt primarily as

a concert hall, and initial thoughts were to turnit into an arts centre with a new Central Libraryattached. But the plans were lacklustre and theystalled. The new library would come later; fornow, Derby had to think in a new and differentway about its cultural future.

To further their thoughts, the Council engagedthe London-based consultancy, David PowellAssociates (DPA), an organisation working in thecomplex interface between place, people andculture. DPA offers strategic advice on culturaldevelopment around the country, often matching

the needs of communities to capital projectsduring periods of regeneration. Over the last twodecades, it has been a hidden catalyst, helpinglocal authorities and other public bodies toharness the power of culture when places are intransition. They have advised on buildings from

BALTIC in Gateshead to Stratford Circus in EastLondon, and on arts and creative industry policyfrom Brighton and the City of Westminster toFolkestone and the Medway towns.

DPA has been involved in enormous change – theowering of Gateshead is just one example – buthas also discovered that intervention does nothave to be dramatic: the right small move canmake big things happen. In Derby, DPA’s initialbrief was to help construct the cultural strategyand to advise on what capital investment wouldbe the light switch for a new artistic future.



David Powell remembers whatit was like: “We worked veryclosely with the people on theCity Council who were reallyinterested in change.” The wayforward was to re up one ortwo passionate individuals andslowly build up a critical massof those who would be willingto drive through some bolddecisions.

“Are you a town or a city?”

was one of the questions thatDavid and his colleague PeterMount challenged the Councilwith, when faith agged. Itwas a question worth asking,as around this time, theEast Midlands DevelopmentAgency was beginning tothink about the three citiesof Nottingham, Leicester andDerby as a cluster that mightwork together to have a morecommanding position on thenational and international stage.Simultaneously, the Arts Councilwas advising the East Midlandsto build on its strengths in thevisual and digital arts.

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Derby is a small city, but thevisual arts could help it topunch its weight not onlywithin the East Midlands, butas a modern European centre.



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“ We wanted to

make a massivestatement aboutart in Derby. ”

In Derby, there were two unrelated butsignicant arts organisations looking forsomewhere to live. One was Metro, a goodart-house cinema, based in a historic but lessthan ideal building owned by the Universityof Derby. The other was Q Arts, a visual artsorganisation with a vigorous core programmeworking in the community with young people.This organisation, too, was based in a not whollysuitable building, impeding it from working toits full potential.

The thinking began. What if Derby started fromscratch and built a new arts centre specicallyto house both Metro and Q Arts, together? Andthen, what if there could be cross-fertilisationbetween them? Fine art, lm and the digital artspresented side by side could be a stimulatingcombination, both for audiences and for thosewanting to make and participate.

Although that precise mix of activities wasinnovative, the idea of combining was familiarterritory for David and Peter. They had helpedto deliver Stratford Circus, a multi-organisationalbuilding which, after some initial faltering, wasnow beginning to work spectacularly well asa home for a handful of education-based artsorganisations, all resident under the same roof,

and all interacting to the benet of the EastLondon community. So they knew the potentialfor a carefully conceived merger to produce agreat deal more than the sum of its parts. DPA’s proposal was for a new visual arts buildingin Derby that would offer continuity to Metroand Q Arts, while lending them new panacheand possibilities galore. If the building was alsodesigned as a meeting place, it might attract awide range of local visitors, stimulating new anddifferent people to get involved and make art.It could bring exhibitions, lm and new digitalskills to the city in ways nobody there had everdared think about.

As Ray Rippingale, the City Council’s AssistantDirector of Cultural Services recalls, Derbytook up the idea with enthusiasm and quicklyrecognised this as its golden opportunity toraise its game. Derby was a small city, but thevisual arts could help it to punch its weight notonly within the East Midlands, but as a modernEuropean centre. “We wanted,” he explains, “tomake a massive statement about ar t in Derby.”Perhaps the new building could even help toll some of those planes that were comingback to the East Midlands Airport empty, afterdepositing droves of Derby people in Barcelona?

Deciding on the building’s geographical locationwas as crucial as dening its role within thecity. Together with DPA, Derby City Councilconsidered as many as 17 possible sites beforethe boldest and most practical was chosen,across the Market Square from the AssemblyRooms.

Something special was in the ofng.



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It has the air of a place thatknows what it’s there forand is ready for action.

From November 2002, until the delivery oftheir bid to the Arts Council in October 2003,David and Peter worked up the business caseand plans for the new building. The responsewas promising. Initial funding was secured. Anarchitectural competition was held in late 2003,David chaired the interview panel and architectsFeilden Clegg Bradley Studios were appointedearly in 2004.

All was not plain sailing. In fact, after a siteassessment in the summer of that year, theproject nearly came to a grinding halt. In theearly 1980s, the QUAD site had been a hole in theground, dug by a hotel which changed its mindand went away. No one in Derby City Councilhas any detailed memory of this time, says Peter.

“But it cost us £150k to empty the hole of junk.It was lled in with railway sleepers, concreteand shopping trolleys.” To add to their problems,the hole had become green space, so there wasopposition to the new building for spoiling it.

Every city has its own mythical view of itself, andas Ray Rippingale explains, in Derby the nostalgiabusiness is big: “For about 20 years, from the1960s onwards, lots of the ancient heart of Derbywas knocked around, demolished, replaced.And so folk memory has it that all the publicauthorities do is destroy our heartland.” DPA,which had helped to galvanise the QUAD project,had now to be the objective outside agency, coolenough to hold the project steady while the city’sarts community and public adjusted to change.

Moreover, having unleashed this exciting visionfor art in the city, DPA also had to containthe ambition, which could so easily be lost ifit overreached itself. The new building mightmake a “massive statement”, but there wasno question of its being grand or extravagant.It would be a new attraction to draw visitorsto Derby, but it would be real and everyday,not a showy shop window. Priced and pitchedreasonably, it would be a wonderful resourcefor local people and prompt renewed vigouracross the cultural board. In those ways it wouldmake a very signicant contribution to the city’scultural life, but would not be expected to carryan unreasonable weight.

A further risk was that as a compact buildingdelivered on a tight capital budget, QUAD waspotentially going to be such an appealing city-

centre venue that it would have to take a lotof wear and tear. It was of course designed tobe robust, but if it was to pay its way, everyspace would need to be in use as much and asoften as possible. This meant that in terms ofmaintenance and running costs, the marginswere bound to be tight. Meanwhile, would thenew venture have time to nd its feet? Wouldthe programme be downgraded if it was notan immediate success? Would there be enoughcontingency in the initial operational budget toallow for loss in the short term?

DPA worked closely with Derby City Council bothto manage the risks and maximise the benetsthat QUAD could bring. As a result, the nishedbuilding seems to have picked up the intelligenceof all the philosophical and practical discussionthat has accompanied its design and delivery.



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While the idea of culture as an instrument tobring people together goes back into the mistsof time, it is only in the last couple of hundredyears that the arts have started to replace religionas a strong moral, political and economic forcethat can serve both the general good and everyindividual; and today almost everyone agrees thatart is empowering. Thanks in no small part to theinuence of John Ruskin percolating down theyears, most of us in Britain would now say that wevalue art in some form, even if we nd it hard tosay exactly why.

Recently the focus has sharpened: people whowork in local government or have anything to dowith urban regeneration – property developers

included – have started to talk up art in a quitespecic way. It is invoked to help communities intransition to embrace change and ower into newlife. And before we accuse anyone of jumping onthe bandwagon, perhaps we should imagine whatit would be like to build or re-envision placeswithout any thought for culture at all: how bleakand un-anchored they would feel.

In Britain, millennium-consciousness and moneyfrom the National Lottery has brought theLowry Centre in Salford, BALTIC in Gateshead,the New Art Gallery in Walsall and the Angel ofthe North. Soon there will be the Angel of theSouth and Turner Contemporary in Margate,both in the newest and most active areas of

Art is empowering

regeneration in England. The size and remit ofthese artistic enterprises vary, but the overallintent is similar: to reect back to communities asense of themselves, to add value, optimism andambition, and to kick-start economic and culturalrevival. Their success has in some cases beenspectacular. Meanwhile, alongside these grandschemes are hosts of smaller arts initiatives, somewith buildings of their own, and some with nocapital base at all, all aimed in different ways atempowering communities, establishing identityand integrating change.

This kind of endeavour has not come out ofnowhere. An alternative movement in the 1960stook action in local pockets of community in the

UK, America and elsewhere, and witnessed withastounding clarity the lift that people felt wheneven minimal changes were made – when someorganised artistic activity was introduced, or justa little dedicated communal space was cleared sothat children could play. Community arts startedin this way, as hands-on experiment. In the 1980s,the movement was picked up by theorists anda whole ideology was built up around ideas ofcultural democracy. But it was before that, inthe 1960s and ‘70s, that the seed of arts in thecommunity was planted. And the people whonow work at DPA were there in the vanguard. David Powell, along with John Knights, PeterMount and Debra Reay – in fact all except one of



the core team with whom he works today – cuttheir teeth at Inter-Action. Founded in the 1960s(and with David Powell himself amongst theearliest members of its governing cooperative),this extraordinary arts organisation workedfor over 20 years in almost every art form,discovering how to use art to make life better,not through abstract ideology, but throughresponding to real people in real places.

At rst it brought theatre and play-schemes together in northwest London,transforming both a derelict site and the lifeof the neighbourhood surrounding it. Then itcommissioned an innovative building by CedricPrice, and worked day and night on a plethora ofimaginative educational and artistic schemes. Ithelped shift something profound about the waywe perceive the relationship between places andtheir inhabitants, and about the cultural rootsand support that people really want and need.

“There was always the focus on doing somethingeffective but unlike anything else. You knew itmight turn out slightly different from what youthought you were going to do, but practicalitydrove the invention.” This is David, recallingthose early Inter-Action projects. But it is aphilosophy that applies just as well to QUAD.He continues, “You address the needs of thecommunity. Engagement and participation arethe ground on which our projects stand. But

those values don’t necessarily respect the qualityof the artist’s contribution, so it is no good justbeing effective and practical. The trick is to work

out how you can make it better and better.You have to be solid – but also eet of foot.”

Inter-Action’s legacy lives on in organisationslike the Weekend Arts Club (WAC), an inspiredyoung people’s performance college whichgrew directly out of it and still thrives in BelsizePark. More widely, its ethos contributed tocreating a new social climate which puts culturevery deliberately at the heart of communitydevelopment and urban regeneration.

Thus, given their history, it is not surprising thattoday it comes naturally to the team at DPA tobring together a number of different roles, in theknowledge that there is no stand-alone phasein the process of developing an arts project.DPA is an organisation that becomes condentlyinvolved at each stage – as an advisor on culturalstrategy, as an author of specic solutions,and as the inventive nurturer and manager ofcapital schemes that place art at the centre ofcommunities and make the most of their powerand optimism.

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DPA has balancedimagination andrisk-taking withresponsibility foroverseeing thedevelopment.

Back to the QUAD story. By November 2004, Derby City Council hadcontracted DPA to project manage the development of QUAD, andPeter was working full time in Derby. The main part of his remit wasto plan the building and oversee its construction. But developing thebuilding also meant working up the plans for how it would be runand what would be in it. So Peter was also the interim captain of theship, and had to negotiate a path through the political complexitythat accompanies any public capital scheme of this kind. Over theperiod there were four differently coloured political Council Cabinetsto be reported to, so however supportive Derby was, the process hadmore than its share of twists and turns. Meanwhile, some at both QArts and Metro were understandably resistant to change, so anotherchallenging task was not to compromise when under pressure fromthose feeling disorientated and aggrieved.

The t eam worked through the difculties and during 2005 and 2006the building was designed and funded, planning consent was given,contractors were appointed and construction began. At the sametime there were big shifts in the management teams of Q Arts andMetro, though not without tears. Working with the Council and thenew board, Peter and DPA dissolved the old structures of Q Arts andMetro and set up the new QUAD organisation – a body that standsindependent of Derby City Council, which owns the building.

DPA has balanced imagination and risk-taking with responsibilityfor overseeing the development. Peter has looked out for Derby’sinterests throughout Quad’s envisioning and construction, takingadvantage of moments where compromise was called for to digdeep for inspiration and pull something even better out of thebag. QUAD, both as a place and a concept, has been very lovinglycreated. His relationship with the Council and the project meansthat when new executive director Keith Jeffrey arrived and the new

management structure was set up, there was a smooth handover.Peter has continued to work, side by side with Keith and the Council,to complete the building.





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Quad 19.9.08 final as printed