ABSTRACT
If you could distil the essence of pure modern architecture, and remove all traces of the usual compromises and cut corners and clumsy details and flash populist moves, then you would get a strange, unsettling, austere, but rather beautiful building. Such absolute purity is of course impossible to achieve. But the New Art Gallery in Walsall comes closer than any new cultural landmark built in Britain for years. It is both extraordinary and extraordinarily good. It repays attention: this is emphatically not a one-liner building.1
