The Depot, Cardiff
2003–2005
Location: Cardiff, UK
Project Status: Competition, first prize
The Depot is a large Victorian building in the centre of Cardiff. It has been in continuous use throughout its 100-year life, and its interior is like a small settlement. The main brick walls and concrete floor register the position of many previous dividing walls and ground trenches, and record the shift in the building’s role as a repair shop for Cardiff’s trams to a maintenance shop for its municipal vehicles. The idea of reusing the building for contemporary art emerged out of discussions around how to augment the visual-arts infrastructure for Wales’s capital city.
The Depot is important both as a process and as a real building. In this context the role of architecture is to enable the building to become public and to make apparent certain aspects of its potential. Rather than proposing a wholesale refurbishment of the building, effort has gone into imagining scenarios for the building’s use, engaging with the local, national and international artistic communities. This process has been documented in a book that was launched at the Welsh pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The publication’s contents reflect the openness of the possibilites for the building without forcing a fixed view of how this should be achieved. Unlike many commissions for new projects, the intellectual and social position of the depot is explicit in its creation.
The Depot will give Cardiff a unique space, showing major international exhibitions, new commisions and collaborations with artists. It will provide accommodation and resources for artists’ residencies and artist-led groups, and initiate staellite activity on a local, national and international scale. With a proposed launch date of 2005, the Depot will provide an essential addition to the international arts scene.