LONDON, ENGLAND.- The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art has won the Gulbenkian Prize for Museum of the Year. The gallery won the prize for its dramatic and innovative landscaping project Landform, designed by the distinguished American architect, Charles Jencks. The £100,000 prize is the largest single arts prize in the UK. The prize money will be used to further develop the gallery grounds with a new, redesigned, sculpture garden. Final designs for the garden will be drawn up by Dan Pearson, the renowned landscape garden designer.
Richard Calvocoressi, Director of the gallery, said: “We are honoured to have won this most prestigious prize sponsored by the Gulbenkian Foundation. The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, and its surrounding parkland, have become special places in the UK for appreciating outdoor sculpture, which Charles Jencks’s beautiful Landform has done much to enhance. We are absolutely delighted that the Gallery has been recognised in this way and we intend to use the award to continue with developments in the grounds and to make them an even more stimulating place for our visitors.”
When the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art decided to redevelop its extensive grounds and reorganize its collection of out-door sculpture, it turned to architect Charles Jencks with a commission for an extraordinary centerpiece. The result, Landform (based on the concept of chaos theory) is part sculpture, part garden, part land-art, a magical back-drop for everything from exhibition openings to the Gallery’s Fun Day for families.
Jencks’s design is based on rhythmic patterns that frequently occur in nature, and his inspiration lies in a range of sources - from meteorological effects to chaos theory. With his late wife Maggie Keswick, Jencks filled the gardens of their Dumfriesshire home with a series of similar features, but the Gallery’s landform is his largest project to date, covering an area of more than 3,000 m2, and rising to a height of 7 m. The design has been carried out by the landscape architects Ian White Associates, in association with Sir Terry Farrell and Partners, the architectural firm responsible for the conversion of the Dean Gallery in 1999.
Speaking about his design, Jencks has said: “I am trying to create a new language of landscape. If you look at the way nature organizes itself, it has inherent principles of movement. I wanted to design something that reflected these natural forces but heightened them. The shapes have been partly inspired by two so-called ‘strange attractors’, one of them called the Ueda Attractor, named after the Japanese scientist that discovered it. These ‘attractors’ (weather systems, for example) create a series of self-similar curves that overlap but never repeat, and are attracted to a certain point or ‘basin’. I think the landform will create a gateway to the area and identify the gallery from the road as a special place – the locus of contemporary art in Scotland.”
The Landform Ueda is part of a continuing scheme to develop the grounds around the Gallery of Modern Art and Dean Gallery as a park for outdoor sculpture. Works by Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Ian Hamilton Finlay and George Rickey have recently been joined by newly acquired sculptures by the American Dan Graham and British artist Rachel Whiteread. The sweeping, gently rising paths of the Landform Ueda give elevated views across the grounds and create new vantage-points for viewing the sculptures, as well as the famously handsome Edinburgh skyline.