At the tip of the headland the site of the new building is exposed on all sides without being defined by either river or road, while the remaining waterside industrial buildings give architectural and urban quality to the area, and a strong physical context to the new building. The resulting sculptural form of the museum may be seen as paying homage to Barbara Hepworth, but the articulation of the form is primarily the consequence of a desire to generate a building that seems to address the different approaches and views of the building. This accumulative composition tries to resolve the organisational requirement of a museum to have a singular point of secure entrance and limited window openings with the formal concern to ensure that the building seems to face its urban setting without creating a dominant façade. In generating a complex form but avoiding explicit contrivance, the design developed around the internal organisation of gallery rooms. Constructed entirely from pigmented in-situ concrete the building consists of a conglomeration of differently sized trapezoidal blocks grouped along the water’s edge. Each single volume represents and coincides with a single space on each floor, each unique in size and shape. From inside the individual blocks, the outer morphology can be clearly seen in ceilings which slope parallel to the outer roofs, and rooms in which no two surfaces lie parallel to one another. Walls meet at diverse angles, and the variations in size and ceiling pitch give each room a unique atmosphere. Daylight enters the galleries through carefully placed incisions in the blocks. The main source of daylight in each gallery is a light slot running the full width of the ceiling at the highest end of each space. The varying angles of each block’s ceiling have been calculated to admit and diffuse light in the best possible way, complementing the artificial lighting system. Louvers allow the light to be regulated or even completely blocked out if necessary. In addition to these light slots several of the galleries feature a window, scaled according to the orientation and importance of the view, framing an aspect to the world surrounding the gallery. The programme is split horizontally between the ground floor and the first floor - exclusively used for exhibition space. The ground floor contains the reception, shop, cafeteria, auditorium, and learning studios, as well as offices and back-of-house areas including the archive, storage, and a loading bay. The cafeteria has a generous terrace space near the main reception area and all public areas enjoy views out of the building. At the core of the building is a central staircase leading to the galleries on the upper floor. This stair, naturally lit from above, draws the eye and the visitor upward. Most of the rooms on the upper level house the gallery’s permanent collections which range from large-scale sculptures and plasters by Barbara Hepworth and others, to highly light sensitive works on paper from the City of Wakefield’s collection of British art. The remaining rooms will host a changing programme of temporary exhibitions. All of the galleries use the same neutral language, allowing for future reinterpretation and representation of art works. Open doorways link the gallery spaces in a fluid and varied sequence, offering tempting glimpses of other artworks and the outside world.