Storefront for Art and Architecture

Storefront for Art and Architecture is an art gallery founded in 1982 in New York. In collaboration with architect Steven Holl and artist Vito Acconci, an exhibition space was created eleven years later that inventively utilized several leftover meters along the sidewalk. Their project replaced the existing facade of the ground floor of the building with a composition of twelve irregularly shaped panels that rotate along a horizontal or vertical axis, which can either connect the entire gallery to the street or completely shut it off at night. The project erases the boundary between the inside and the outside. The rotating panels give the facade an infinite number of appearances.

“The interactive dynamic of the gallery argued for an inside-out facade, which addresses insular art and turns it out to the public street. Hinged walls rotate on both axes, which allows some to become tables and benches. The body is linked to wall forms in the crude way that the shoulder is needed to push space out or pull it in.
Rather than pure, minimal space, this space is crossbred. It can be exact and then suddenly change into dynamic combinative space. It can be severe or easygoing. When the facade is closed, it takes the typological form of a Manhattan triangular slice of a shopfront. When it is open, it becomes drawn into the city outside. The three-dimensional volume can be disposed towards the four-dimensional with changes in time. With this facade, the Storefront realized a new type of dynamic, urban interactive space...”