PROGRAM: Art Gallery

STATUS: Completed 2014

SIZE: 4,000 SF

Longhouse Projects is a commercial art gallery in Lower Manhattan. Originally from Japan, Longhouse Projects wanted to  establish a presence in NYC to showcase contemporary Japanese artists to a larger audience and to expand its curatorial scope to include artists from around the world. Our work for them started as a real estate search. After pounding pavement through Chelsea, and the Bowery, we landed on a 4000 square foot ground-floor space in an evolving downtown neighborhood just west of Soho. 

We designed a space meant to embrace the gallery’s principle that viewing art should be a highly personal experience between the viewer and the art and distractions should be minimized.  In response to this maxim, the first space that one enters from the street is sun-filled, without art, and meant for decompressing. In contrast to the exhibition space, this space retains more of the industrial qualities of the building. Elements such as the building’s ceiling structure, electrical conduit, and ductwork are left exposed. A freestanding furniture-wall clad in oxidized maple with an aluminum shelf for gallery publications separates the office from the entry. This partition is also meant to allow visitors to make a beeline for the artwork without being disturbed by gallery staff.

The two thousand square feet of exhibition space is intentionally removed from the noise and light of the street, but is also visible from the street through the glass entrance doors. Our client wanted their exhibition spaces to be visually uncluttered and places of respite, in which a visitor is encouraged to linger. Responding to these desires, the art galleries are clean white boxes with Douglas Fir floors where lighting and HVAC diffusers are detailed to disappear. In order to meet Longhouse Projects’ environmental requirements, the existing HVAC system needed to be upgraded to a system that maintains relative humidity between forty and fifty percent. The lighting was designed to be flexible enough to accommodate the needs of the vast array of artists exhibiting in the space and showcase works from painting to sculpture to large video installations.