"Camulodunum" at firstsite Colchester.
Colchester today is rough around the edges, a garrison town in Essex with an air of having fallen on hard times. Boarded-up shops and a proliferation of pawnbrokers tell a melancholy tale.
But once upon a time this was Camulodunum, Britain’s oldest recorded town. Emperor Claudius arrived in 43 AD with an invasion force complete with the latest shock-and-awe weapons of the day, in the form of armoured elephants. He made the town his capital, so this corner of thoroughly modern Essex is also shot through with signs and symbols of a classical past: fragments of a temple poking up out of parkland; an ancient gateway hard by a four-lane underpass; and – ensconced behind pigeon-netting high on the front of the town hall – a statue of the local heroine, Boadicea, who once led the ancient Britons in revolt against their Roman rulers.
The latest addition to the civic fabric of the town is a brand new £25 million arts centre: a large, low, curvilinear building entirely clad in bright gold copper-aluminium panels, designed by a New York-based Uruguayan architect called Rafael Vinoly. Its official name is Firstsite, although Vinoly himself has christened it "The Golden Banana". Its opponents argue that whatever the colour it is no more than a white elephant, every bit as unwelcome as those that invaded back in the days of Claudius. Firstsite has been much complained about locally, which is perhaps inevitable in a time of recession.
The building is certainly striking, and certainly like nothing else in Colchester. It resembles a huge spaceship but also looks like a fragment, a piece of some mysterious larger whole. It might almost be a section of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao, broken off and turned from silver to gilt. It also evokes the...
