+ Richard Serra Gallery ₂₀₁₄

This project was undertaken as a fourth year design studio in 2014. The studio brief asked participants to design a contemporary art museum with the specific intention of preserving and presenting a permanent retrospective of drawings by the contemporary American artist Richard Serra. Together with this body of work, the museum aims to show some of his large-scale steel sculptures.

The given site was located in an area defined by Gansevoort street and W13th street in the Meatpacking District of New York City. Currently the lot is occupied by a one-storey building of around 50 years old that was renovated in 2006 by the Japanese architect Junya Ishigami.

Studio participants were given two constraints - 1. the new building should have the footprint of the existing building and the height of the residential building next door and 2. - the existing brick one-story building’s external walls must be preserved and included in the design strategy of the new building. The design for this project was predominately achieved through large scale 1:50 physical models that sought to explore the potentials of an interior space defined by a fixed envelope.

In this proposal the building’s functions are divided by the insertion of a volume which separates the main body of the Serra collection from the more public uses. These freely accessible areas have a direct relationship to each other as a result of the voids formed between the existing envelope constraints and the double height volume; the user is always aware of the mass they are below, within or above. By lowering a portion of the ground floor views are provided from the street into gallery areas as well as the basement where stored artwork can be seen from the theatre lobby. The ground floor is designed as an open public thoroughfare that is compressed by the volume above. A public stair leads from the ground floor into the public temporary exhibition and education space above. From there a separate stair circulates users through the private collection.