The National Collections Centre at Wroughton is difficult to understand through ordinary architectural measures. At 90 metres wide and 300 metres long, the building operates somewhere between warehouse, hangar, archive and constructed landscape: a volume so large that distance begins to flatten detail and objects assume strange new relationships to one another.
Photographing it for Sam Jacob meant working with that distortion of scale. Long perspectives disappear towards vanishing points; shelving becomes elevation and horizon; isolated objects sit within acres of polished floor as though temporarily stranded. A missile, a Snow Cat, a telescope, operating theatre or a ship model can appear monumental at one moment and almost incidental at the next.
Sam Jacob Studio’s intervention gives structure to this extraordinary field. The floor grid, supergraphics, colour coding and object groupings are not simply wayfinding devices but a form of spatial ordering, closer to urbanism than conventional museum display. Tall objects gather like pieces of a skyline, smaller artefacts form neighbourhoods around them, while particular objects terminate axes or punctuate corners. Sol LeWitt meets logistics; the visual language of the warehouse becomes an architectural system for reading a collection measured in hundreds of thousands of things.
What interested me photographically were the spaces produced between them: the surreal voids, repeated frames, echoes of colour, sudden alignments and improbable changes of scale. It is an architecture whose subject is partly absence, the enormous quantities of air required to store, move, conserve and continually rearrange the material evidence of science, technology and industry.
The photographs became less about documenting a storage building than trying to register the peculiar spatial condition Sam Jacob Studio has drawn out of it: a collection organised as a city, encountered through perspective.
