Bowery People's Art Museum
This studio project was to design an art museum that was sited in the Chinatown neighborhood on a thru-block. The two bordering streets, Bowery and Chrystie, exhibit entirely different characters. The building mediates these varied conditions. I chose to explore the possibilities of brick as a material for the art museum, reinterpreting the material’s typically heavy quality into a light and delicate surface.
All patterns use the standard brick size, and are organized vertically in strips of five foot height which gradually change curvature as the elevation goes up. Undulating effects are created in a gridded brick screen by pushing and pulling each brick slightly in different directions. The spacing in the open patterns gradually closes to create standard stacked or running bond patterns on the facade.
