Amant is spread across three blocks of rapidly changing, industrial North Brooklyn. An innovative cultural incubator, the facility functions both privately and publicly, housing artist studios, galleries, offices, a performance space, and a cafe.
Central to Amant’s design is the idea of an urban oasis, a space where the pace of art-making can slow to allow experimentation and meaningful reflection. The campus converses with the site’s eclectic post-industrial neighborhood, just as the organization housed within fosters dialogue between artist, visitor, and community.
Rather than isolating from their urban context, the distributed volumes weave through the fabric of the city. Pockets of outdoor space with multiple entry points provide myriad opportunities to relate to the surrounding neighborhood while providing sanctuary from the city’s intensity. Public routes channeled through large city blocks create new means of circulation and discovery. Courtyards and thoroughfares dart through and between existing buildings, moving visitors past more private spaces at the periphery to centrally located galleries and exhibitions.
Each of the four buildings in this collection contributes a gallery unique in proportion, size, light quality, and infrastructure. The porous campus remains flexible to curation, facilitating diverse, technically demanding programming on large to intimate scales for local and international artists across disciplines.
Materials render the buildings partly anonymous. Deeply textured form liners shape cast-in-place concrete. Bricks rotate out of plane to catch shadows. Galvanized steel bars toy with reflection and transparency. Each building nestles comfortably within its industrial context, offering surprising tactility, detail, and depth up close that betrays the familiar and the everyday.
■建築概要
Client: Lonti Ebers
Location: Brooklyn, New York
Program: Artist studios, galleries, performance space, offices, and cafe.
Design: 2014
Completion: 2021
Project area: Site area: 1670 m² (Site area), 16,400 SF (Built indoor area), 21,000 SF (Total
area incl. Indoor and outdoor)
SO – IL Executive Team: Florian Idenburg, Jing Liu, Kevin Lamyuktseung, Ted Baab
SO – IL Design Team: Pietro Pagliaro, Grace Lee, Sanger Clark, Lucia Sanchez-Ramirez, Álvaro Gómez-Sellés, Kristen Too, Sophie Nichols, Christopher Riley, Alexandre Hamlyn, Regina Teng, Etienne Vallat, Marisa Musing, Tyler Mauri, Julie Perrone, Mario Serrano, Diego Fernandez, John Chow
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Project Manager: Paratus Group
Structural: Silman Associates
MEP: CES Engineering, Plus Group Engineering
Lighting: Buro Happold Engineering
Cladding Consultant: Simpson Gumpertz & Heger
Civil: Bohler Engineering
Expediter: J. Callahan Consulting, Inc.
Acoustics / AV / Security: Harvey Marshall Berling Associates
Concrete: Reginald Hough Associates
Geotechnical: Langan Engineering, PMT Laboratories, Inc
Landscape: Future Green
Graphics: Linked by Air
（原文）
Join Jeff Rosenheim, Joyce Frank Menschel Curator in Charge, Department of Photographs, for a virtual tour of Bernd & Hilla Becher, a retrospective celebrating the renowned German artists, Bernd and Hilla Becher (1931–2007; 1934–2015), who changed the course of late twentieth-century photography. Working as a rare artist couple, they focused on a single subject: the disappearing industrial architecture of Western Europe and North America that fueled the modern era. Their seemingly objective style recalled nineteenth- and early twentieth-century precedents but also resonated with the serial approach of contemporary Minimalism and Conceptual art. Equally significant, it challenged the perceived gap between documentary and fine-art photography.
Using a large-format view camera, the Bechers methodically recorded blast furnaces, winding towers, grain silos, cooling towers, and gas tanks with precision, elegance, and passion. Their rigorous, standardized practice allowed for comparative analyses of structures that they exhibited in grids of between four and thirty photographs. They described these formal arrangements as “typologies” and the buildings themselves as “anonymous sculpture.”
The exhibition celebrates the Bechers’ remarkable achievement and is the first ever organized with full access to the artists’ personal collection of working materials and their comprehensive archive.
