The Len Lye Centre in New Plymouth is New Zealand’s first art museum dedicated to a single artist, and with its curved exterior walls of mirror-like stainless steel, it will also be the country’s first example of destination architecture linked to contemporary art.

On Saturday 25 July it will be open to the public alongside the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Zealand’s museum of contemporary art. The project respectfully links into the smaller Govett-Brewster, which itself has been retrofitted from the city’s decommissioned heritage cinema.

The combined facility is undivided, with a circular loop allowing visitors to appreciate the changing museum and gallery displays within one flexible and shared structure. 

Govett-Brewster director Simon Rees says staff are planning a community-spirited weekend celebration and preparing opening exhibitions which include Len Lye works, the Govett-Brewster Collection, and a moving-image programme in the new 62-seat cinema.

The opening weekend will celebrate the culmination of more than three decades’ commitment to realising a permanent home for Len Lye’s work in New Plymouth.

“We will at last be able to show the breadth and depth of Lye’s vision on a permanent basis, and also continue to inspire Govett-Brewster’s audiences with contemporary art from New Zealand and around the Pacific Rim,” says Rees.

The building’s design by Pattersons Associates articulates Len Lye’s philosophy on the relationship between art and architecture. The space is reverential, creating a sensory experience from light as a ‘temple’ for art.

To celebrate the Taranaki region’s innovative steel industry, the ‘temple’ is wrapped in a curved façade of highly reflective stainless steel – its architects refer to this as “Taranaki’s ‘local stone’”. 

The exterior creates different reflections during each day and season, and a plaza around the building to showcase these light reflections is due to be installed early next year.

Design director Andrew Patterson says creating a new home for the Len Lye Collection was an honour. “We were thrilled to be offered this commission. Len Lye is an inspirational figure who bridged a multitude of creative disciplines. This building is about amplifying his work by physically representing the partnership that he identified between art and architecture.”

Patterson continues, “we hope the design challenges the dominance of pure modernism in contemporary thought. Classicism has been unfashionable for many decades and the Len Lye Museum seeks to extend modernist language with meaning.”

Len Lye (1901-1980) is one of the most important and influential artists to emerge from New Zealand. Lye’s interests lay in the possibilities of light and movement. He brought a particularly creative energy to his sculptures, filmmaking, painting and writing, that saw him establish himself as a key innovator in contemporary art in the 21st century.

His pioneering ‘direct films’, made by painting and scratching on celluloid, were part of Lye’s prescient vision for a ‘new art movement’ in the 1920s. By the 1940s, he was creating dynamic and innovative kinetic sculptures in New York. Today, his hand-made films and sculptures continue to receive expanding interest and acclaim.

The 2012 video below takes a further look at Len Lye and his centre.

Simon Rees of Govett-Brewster comments, “Pattersons was chosen by the selection jury for an architect’s vision that best matched itself to the inventiveness, whimsy, and materials of Len Lye’s work, and particularly embraced the importance of light to Len as an artist who was both filmmaker and sculptor of highly finished metals.

“The building provides a fitting setting for Len Lye’s work because of its materials, design, apportionment of spaces and its new cinema. It will do Len proud.”