Like other cities in Northern England, Wakefield was faced with the decline of mining and manufacturing. Its new museum commemorating Barbara Hepworth, a sculptor who spent her early years in Wakefield, demonstrates its will to look to the future. The art museum is the prelude to a larger-scale urban intervention: the regeneration of the river front to the south of the city centre. The site is visible from all directions; accordingly, the architects developed a building with no clear back or front. Thanks to the museum’s scale and building massing – which calls to mind geological formations – the building does not enter into competition with the historic warehoues and factory buildings, but instead is well integrated in its surroundings. The nature of the composition is additive and has its source in the program: the collection is presented sequentially in rooms that are similar in character, yet with different dimensions, responding to the proportions of the respective artworks they contain. In this manner, with a system of recurring angles, a densely packed cluster of irregularly shaped cubes is arranged around a central stairway.