In the heart of England’s Lake District National Park, Windermere Lake is surrounded by a sparsely urbanised, and yet profoundly man-made landscape, “picturesque” mainly because of its diversity. Forests, cultivated fields, little marinas and ancient mansions, such as Alberto Voysey’s Broad Leys, align on its shores, as well as the Windermere Jetty Museum, designed by Carmody Groarke.
The new museum pays a tribute to the “population” of vessels of all sorts – steamboats and launches, cable ferries and motor-boats, speedboats and sailboats – crisscrossing through the lake since the mid-19th century, when the opening of the local railway line turned the region into a popular tourist destination.
Built within a former gravel extraction plant, Carmody Groarke’s design reshapes the topography and the coastline of the site where it stands. Concrete podiums raise five square-plan volumes – hosting, among other things, the entrance, cafeteria, conservation galleries and the rooms for educational activities – whereas the wet dock’s elongated hangar sinks into the lake’s waters, and four new jetties protrude towards them.
Large glazed openings and sliding doors, as well as the oversized, asymmetrical roof overhangs, transform the building into an unstable threshold between outside and inside, the body of water and the inland, the open air sailing experience and its representation within a museum.
To conclude, thanks to the comprehensive oxidized copper cladding, the cluster of pavilions reunites into a single, recognizable entity: a compact architecture, yet one which quivers through the metal folds, clearly contemporary and yet reminiscent of the memory of a bygone industrial vernacular.
- Project:
- Windermere Jetty Museum
- Program:
- museum
- Location:
- Bowness-on-Windermere, United Kingdom
- Architects:
- Carmody Groarke
- Structural engineer:
- Ove Arup
- Landscape design:
- Jonathan Cook Landscape Architecture
- Exhibition design:
- Real Studios
- Completion:
- 2019