"The past is never where you think you left it" – Katherine Anne Porter
When I see refurbishment work has been done to an old building I allow myself to wonder how the design team arrived at the decisions they made.
When you have a structure with over a hundred of years of life, do you choose to set aside that history or to reinstate the interiors to a period somewhere in its past?
Do you go for the most interesting or attractive iteration of the building's life, the most commercially viable or aim to achieve the purity of its original design for its own sake.
At Battersea Arts Centre the answer is all of the above, and not in sequence but concurrently.
It gives the place an eclectic look. A mess some would say. But there is something endearing about the way it is so pre–loved; it evokes the same fondness that you have for your granny's front room – littered with decades' worth of random, cherished family souvenirs.
There is also something poignant in seeing the remnants of past productions. Nothing gets painted over at Battersea Arts Centre until needs must; it is an intentional design choice that has the walls echo everything they have ever been.
On my tour of the building I see native American designs on an archway, the leftovers of a Twin Peaks 20th anniversary weekend, the 'Sanitary Office' sign from the building's original use, revealed when water came in and took off layers of paint that buried it.
I also see remains of The Mask of the Red Death, a building takeover show from site specific experts Punchdrunk in 2007, another pivotal period in the life of BAC, and not just because this Edgar Allan Poe adaptation played to sell out audiences for eight months.
Not for the first time there were money problems. It seems that every decade had its own financial predicament.
The funding cuts of the early 1980s had seen the arts centre under threat of closure, and in the 1990s artistic director Tom Morris (now at Bristol old Vic) both saved it from bankruptcy and transformed its artistic programme.
In the noughties, the building was still shared between the Council and the arts centre. Artistic director since 2004 David Jubb describes the arrangement as, "the child of a slightly dysfunctional marriage between Battersea Arts Centre and Wandsworth Borough Council.
"You'd get married in the back half of the building and you'd do 'art' in the front half and never the twain should meet. There were literally doors, locked, in between the two sides. Now that is wrong on so many levels...
"We [had] started to think about how we could open up the building [but then] we had quite a significant crisis.
"The Council decided that it was not only going to withdraw all of its funding but also that it was going to charge rent and rates on the building—a figure of about £375,000—and we only had three months' notice."
Both financial adversity and structural compartmentalisation were resolved with Battersea Arts Centre taking a long lease on the building. This allowed the venue to raise capital funding and start to realise a £13.3 million redevelopment of the building.
Support awarded to Jubb from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Breakthrough Fund at around the same time meant that David Micklem could join the artistic directorship team when additional leadership capacity was needed to oversee this period of evolution for the arts centre.
And evolution it was: the building was not being re–worked in isolation. The award also supported the inception of Playgrounding, a practice founded on the Scratch concept pioneered by Morris and Jubb and named by Kazuko Hohki.
Now at the heart of Battersea Arts Centre, Playgrounding synthesises the artistic endeavour of the building's users and its architects', Haworth Tompkins.