Page 61 - Studio International - May June 1975

Kettle's Yard

Architects: Professor Sir Leslie Martin and David Owers

In collaboration with the University of Cambridge Estate Management Advisory Service

Quotation from the editorial of
Cambridge Review, 29th May 197o.
Antimuseum

Four years ago Mr H. S. Ede gave
Kettle's Yard, his home, to the University.
Early this month Prince Charles opened
the new extension and gallery. The first
exhibition from the Tate and Fitzwilliam
is already on show. The first concert by
Daniel Barenboim and Jacqueline du Pre
has already been given. With
characteristic energy Jim Ede has thus
brought part of his idea for the arts in
Cambridge into existence. What this idea
is he described in his speech at the
opening:
It is a place which I started to make
some thirteen years ago in the thought
that being our home it could prove also a
home to undergraduates, a place where
they found that art was no removed
event, but a vital part of our daily life. . . .
Kettle's Yard, unlike the Fitzwilliam
Museum, is in no way meant to be an Art
Gallery or Museum, nor even a special
collection of works of art reflecting what
might be called my taste, or the taste of a
given period. It is, rather, a continuing
way of life from these last 50 years, in
which stray objects, stones, glass,
pictures, sculpture, in light and in space,
have been used to make manifest the
underlying stability which more and
more we need to recognize if we are not to
be swamped by all that is so rapidly
opening up before us.
There has always been this need, and I 2
think there always will be; it is a
condition of human life, and in Kettle's
Yard, which should, I think, grow only
very slowly, I hope that future
generations will still find a home and a
welcome, a refuge of peace and order,
of the visual arts and of music. •

View from garden
2 Upper level
3 Lower level
4 Section through new gallery extension

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