His latest project is a Master Film Store for the British Film Institute, a vast, £12m warehouse to hold the nation's moving image heritage in safe, secure, climate-controlled conditions.
It officially opens next month, and I confess I have only seen it through photographs and (appropriately enough) film, but it looks to be an extraordinary piece of work.
Sited in the remotest parts of Warwickshire on a disused RAF nuclear bomb assembly and storage facility, the BFI's archive store is a hugely impressive building.
Built to a parsimonious budget it looks anything but, and its astonishing "excellent" BREEAM rating is testament to the thought that has gone into something that should, on all rational measures, be a wanton consumer of energy (the building is designed to keep the film at all times at -5C and no more than 35% humidity).
This building is essentially a giant machine rather than being a relatively simple warehouse structure, but one that had to be designed to cope with one of the most flammable materials in non-military life: nitrate film can spontaneously combust; once alight it is almost impossible to extinguish (it carries on burning even when completely submerged in water); and it gives off copious quantities of cyanide gas.
Nitrate film is arranged in thirty fireproof "cells" around the outside of the building, and if a fire breaks out in any one of them the whole of the massive exterior wall panel falls away, allowing a "clean burn", while the projecting concrete fins prevent the fire spreading to any of the adjoining cells no matter what the wind or other conditions.
Regular readers will know of my enthusiasm for the BFI's archive and its curatorial work (see the post a couple of days ago celebrating the forthcoming release of all Humphrey Jennings' films on DVD). I'm delighted that the national collection of film and television is to be so safely stored in this extraordinary building. Three cheers both for them and for Ted Cullinan.
2 comments:
But has Kevin of Grand Designs approved it yet? [Philip of prlidbury@hotmail.com]
Kevin would have been worried that the design wouldn't work as well as the builders hoped, would be fixated on some minor supply problem (will the glass arrive on time? Will the whole project collapse as a result of a shortage of door handles?), and then would have worshipped the end result as a triumphant realisation of the original dream.
Or am I being too cynical?
PS: I love Kevin. Honest. In fact Grand Designs is my favourite property porn: I have all the DVDs. Though am a bit annoyed that they've never released the overseas episodes -- there was a Modernist house in Andalucia that I'm dying to see again.
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