Project 3: artgalleryshophouse IDEA

Narrative:
A dealer who likes art work, especially sculpture, is willing to share art works to public.


In this project, site 3 is chose to design an art gallery. It is located between two buildings. The heights of the left and right buildings are 9 m and 13 m accordingly.

As the topics of art gallery is COMMERICAL. That’s mean it has to sell the art work successfully. Then what I think is that the building should be attractive to draw public attention in the street.From the site analysis, there are canopy on most buildings’ facades (yellow tracing paper 1).

The façade will block the pedestrian’s view to the surrounding buildings. Therefore, I would like to make a difference or make a statement from the street. As the dealer likes the sculpture art work, I treated the façade as the sculptural form (yellow tracing paper 2). The uneven form can give the unpredictable feeling to public. From the high transparency façade, most art works in gallery can be valued. The opening is also able to act as the “media” to keep the communication between inside and outside.

Secondly, as a commercial art gallery, it should be maximized the visual space to public as possible. In order to achieve this, wall is avoided to use as possible in the gallery because it will block the view within the gallery and the view from street. However, it is still necessary to divide spaces. Therefore, concept of “changing level” is introduced. The “changing level“ concept can be achieved by using few steps so that different height level of areas can give visitors the sense of space division.

Moreover, in traditional art gallery, eye level of visitors is kept in horizontal only to view the art work. However, concept of “changing level” can give visitors more angles to view the same art work. Through the “up and down” movement, visitors can get the rich visual experience within the gallery (yellow tracing paper 3).

Because the dealer likes sculpture, the courtyard is designed at the centre of building and is at the centre of circulation. From the dealer’s house, there is a long viewing platform for him to view the courtyard directly.

Finally, the workshop and storeroom is designed at the end of the building near the lane so that it will be convenient for moving the large art work from the lane through courtyard to large gallery.