Amant

Written by Omar Dahabra

Location:New York, US
Year: 2021
Architects: SO – IL
Photography by: Naho Kubota

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. Text description by the architects.

Source: www.divisare.com + www.so-il.org

Omar Dahabra
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