Brooklyn-based studio Solid Objectives – Idenburg Liu, otherwise known as SO – IL, is coming home. They have designed a new hybrid space for exhibiting and creating art in a nearby neighborhood, blending their idiosyncratic style with the urban fabric of New York City’s most populous borough.
The Artes Amant Gallery will house “the production, display, and storage of art,” comprising exhibition spaces and workshops within a series of shell-like spaces between two existing Brooklyn buildings. The proposed structure reads as a homogenous block of sculpted concrete characterized by curving planes that evoke the tensile fabric façades of SO – IL’s previous arts spaces, such as the Kujke Gallery in Seoul, South Korea.
According to the architects, geometry of each concrete shell is defined by parameters pertaining to programming, light, and circulation: “the constant calibration of these constraints informs the contours of the building.” The concrete appears to have been pulled taut over an unseen frame that defines each internal space, creating “edges and seams that slip in and out of appearance.”
Some beautifully understated interior renders give a glimpse of the rooms within, portraying “nearly edgeless” spaces in which a single chair and a solitary stepladder communicates the relative scale of each gallery. The cavernous voids surround an external courtyard in which further art and sculpture can be displayed.
Viewed from the outside, the apparent scale of the four-story building is diminished by the homogenous use of pale concrete punctuated with carefully placed apertures that allow natural light to infiltrate the exhibition spaces. Through this composition of solid and transparent surfaces, SO – IL is aiming to strike a balance between iconic and everyday architecture: “throughout, the building’s suppleness and muted palette play with ambiguity and legibility; neither monumental nor prosaic, instead it entices.”
Artes Amant Gallery is set to begin construction soon, within a projected completion date of 2017.