Yorkshire Sculpture Park has revealed ambitious plans for an ambitious £3.8m new visitor centre – the latest in a long line of major projects at the popular visitor attraction.
If all goes to plan the new centre proposed for the southern entrance to the park less than one mile away from M1 junction 38 should be built by late 2017 and will increase the park’s scope to welcome even more visitors.
Although the park has an allocation of £1.7m towards the new building from Arts Council England an on-going fundraising campaign will need to raise the remaining £2.1m required.
At the moment the award-winning visitor attraction near West Bretton attracts more than 400,000 people every year.
A planning application has been submitted to Wakefield Council.
The environmentally friendly centre has been designed by London-based architects Feilden Fowles to fit sympathetically with the historic landscape.
Watch: Julian Opie's Galloping Horse exhibit at the park
It will include a restaurant, gallery space, a public foyer and a shop.
The building will be well insulated and naturally ventilated, featuring an air-source heat pump for heating and a dense green roof. It will incorporate a pioneering low energy environmental control system using a passive humidity buffer to maintain favourable atmospheric conditions in the gallery.
A YSP spokeswoman said: “A world-class gallery space will give visitors access to some of the greatest art of the 20th and 21st centuries through a changing programme of temporary exhibitions.
LOOK: Some of the YSP's most eye-catching exhibits
“The centre will also increase physical, intellectual and emotional access to the landscape, ecology and heritage of the historic 500-acre Bretton Estate as well as the sculpture presented elsewhere in the park.”
The project will complete a series of developments at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) that began with the opening of Longside Gallery in 2001, the main visitor centre in 2002, the introduction of the Underground Gallery in 2005, the transformation of the estate kennel block into the Rushbond Learning Centre and café in 2011, and most recently the refurbishment of the chapel in 2014.
