Clarity, Light & Well-Being: 7 Transcendent Art Spaces by Selldorf Architects

When asked whether she considers herself the “architect for the agnostic” in her designs for cultural spaces, Annabel Selldorf, principal at Selldorf Architects, weighed the suggestion of art as religious experience. “We create and assign spaces to enable the experiences of such transcendence,” she proposed, “and traditionally art and architecture have done this in unison.”

Working primarily on adaptive reuse projects of various scales and histories, the architect and her firm have mastered the art of restraint. Attuned to the specific needs and particularities of a space, the projects undertaken by the firm each have their own distinct solutions, difficult to lump under one signature aesthetic or design principle. This is ultimately what makes Selldorf’s oeuvre, which has been compiled in a new monograph from Phaidon, so multifaceted and engaging.

This collection selects seven of Selldorf Architects’ designs for exhibition spaces. Each one is different in the objects it houses, but all affirm the architect’s guiding beliefs: that architecture “should be thoroughly conceived such that nothing needs to be added or subtracted, ultimately making space dedicated to clarity and light and well-being.”

David Zwirner 20th Street, New York, N.Y., United States

Squarely stating its position in the art-conscious neighborhood of Chelsea, David Zwirner’s 20th Street outpost is a gallery built like a museum. Exposed concrete and strictly spaced teak windows make up the façade, while expansive, column-free galleries define the interior. Designed to make room for larger installations by the artists on Zwirner’s roster — which includes the likes of Dan Flavin, Yayoi Kusama and Richard Serra — the concrete floors and bright daylighting of the exhibition spaces make it a contemporary art mecca to contend with.

Hauser & Wirth 18th Street, New York, N.Y., United States

A few blocks down from David Zwirner, Hauser & Wirth’s second New York gallery sits in what was once The Roxy, a former roller rink and nightclub. Entering the nondescript garage, visitors are drawn up a sweeping staircase before entering the vast 10,000-square-foot gallery free of any supporting columns. Inside, the architects enlarged the existing skylights and restored the original wooden ceilings and steel trusses, creating a sprawling exhibition space perfect for large-scale art installations.

Neue Galerie, New York, N.Y., United States

Reconfiguring a private mansion into a cultural space for German and Austrian art, the architects were faced with the challenge of implementing the infrastructure of a museum without disturbing the material details and elegant proportions of the existing building. The 5,000 square feet of gallery space for the permanent collection, along with additional space for temporary shows, are bounded by the ornate walls of the site, while newer details such as the reception desk and elevator introduce a subtle but defiant modernism to the historic space.

Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass., United States

Located on a 140-acre site in the Berkshires, the Clark Art Institute selected Selldorf Architects and Gensler to carry out a renovation of the museum building and research center. After reconfiguring the circulation and transforming unused areas of the buildings into new galleries, the architects devised a new visitor experience that focused on a calmer interaction with the permanent collection and an enhanced set of research facilities.

The Encyclopaedic Palace, Venice, Italy

Designed by Annabelle Selldorf and curator Massimiliano Gioni, The Encyclopedic Palace was the overarching exhibition theme that took over the central space of the massive Arsenale during the 2013 Art Biennale. Blanketing the brick walls of the historic factory with the familiar white surfaces of the gallery, the design introduced new circulation patterns that encouraged visitors to explore the exhibition in a slower, more thoughtful manner.

Le Stanze del Vetro, Venice, Italy

Le Stanze del Vetro is a museum of 20th and 21st-century glassmaking located in a former warehouse on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore. In its layered history, the project epitomizes adaptive reuse — before becoming an exhibition space in 2012, the warehouse had been used as a boarding school during the 1950s, resulting in interiors that still bear traces of its past. The architects converted the vestigial classrooms into seven intimate galleries for temporary exhibitions and used the existing corridor to store the museum’s permanent collection.

Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, Calif., United States

Slated to open in 2019, the third expansion of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego is set to provide more gallery space, a distinct entrance and a fortified connection with its oceanic context. The architects’ addition to the museum matches the massing of the existing building by dividing the new space into smaller volumes punctured with generous skylights. In the latest expansion, material is crucial — terrazzo floors unify the entire project while the cast concrete and travertine panels that make up the exterior call to mind Louis Kahn’s iconic Salk Institute, located nearby.

Want to explore more from Selldorf Architects? Receive 30% off of Phaidon’s new monograph of the studio’s work in the Phaidon online store.