FINAL CONCEPT

As the art galleries I enjoy most on a personal level allow the viewer to travel about the space how they wish whilst still maintaining a level of guidance, I wanted to try and obtain this in my final design. I feel as though the type of space I have designed suits the long narrow site and blends into its surrounding context. I decided the best way in which to address these two issues was to create a warehouse-like space which was flexible in the sense it can exhibit any type of artwork. There are a number of spaces that can be utilized to exhibit any medium of art, such as paintings, photographs, sculpture, installations and even video art. The architectural interest of the building is achieved through the different heights of the levels, drawing from my work in Project One on the Muller House, as well as the long ribbon like stairs along one side and the skylights over these stairs allowing for natural light to filter through numerous levels.

I decided to keep the art gallery space and the artist's workshop space quite separate but still connected in some way. I achieved this by locating the workshop towards the rear of the site after the sculptural courtyard and by not allowing access to this space from the courtyard. The visitors to the gallery are able to connect to the artists working in the space through a large glass window. This also allows the artists to not feel completely isolated while working but maintains a degree of separation conducive to creating art. The entrance to this space faces the rear of the site, and with the openness of this end of the site, a connection between the park at the rear and the entire site is made.

I also wanted to continue my exploration of public vs private space, something that my design for Project Two was heavily based on, by trying to make both the artist's workshop and gallery owner's apartment as separate as possible whilst still maintaining their relationship to the rest of the site. The apartment is only accessible through the owner's office, and so is automatically made very private.

I initially found this project quite challenging as there were so many possibilities in regards to what style of gallery, what site, as well as which artists to concentrate on. In the end, I was most inspired by the image of the large open space, in the inspirational images section, and so wanted to design a gallery space that was as flexible as possible. It was also quite challenging to create an interesting space with flow and dynamism within the 30m length restriction. Whilst I understand the reasoning behind this restriction, an attempt to force us to build up, perhaps a better restriction would have been - needs to be at least two storeys. I think this would have benefitted me as it would be interesting to develop the site in a more linear manner.