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‘T’ SPACE


Experimental gallery and exhibition space

On a four-acre site in Dutchess County, New York, a wooden ‘T’ space sits near a stone ‘U’ house from 1952, which has a steel ‘L’ addition from 2001.

The gallery floats over the natural landscape. It has nine steel columns and nine elevations, all integrated via proportions of 1:1.618.

A rain skin of natural 2×2 cedar is suspended on stainless steel screws. There is no plumbing or sheetrock. The interiors are painted plywood and the floor is sanded marine plywood with all the stains of the four month construction process exposed.

Wooden windows, doors and skylights were specifically built for this space. The gallery is reached from the east by a gently sloping wooden ramp, and exited on a wooden ramp through the south elevation which is a large pivoting wall.

Light comes from skylights, cut to achieve 25 foot candles of natural light on the walls, eliminating the need for electricity.

Images

Quotes

Like all of Holl’s projects, ‘T’ Space is surprising. Built of narrow cedar planks suspended on stainless steel, the gallery has two separate viewing spaces. The ground floor, which has a double-story ceiling, is a rectangle that contains a staircase leading to an upper story that looks down on it. The upper story is set at an angle, making it a perfect exhibition space for works on paper and smaller pieces. The shafts of daylight that stream in from the skylights create an ideal environment for showing work that’s rarely available to artists. The essential modesty of the building—the walls are plywood painted white and the floors are sanded plywood—permits the art, not the architecture, to be the main attraction.

[…] The rediscovery of the Hudson River Valley by a new generation of artists and writers, happier in the silence of the woods than in the bustle of Brooklyn, is slowly creating a new art nexus. The fact that ‘T’ Space and its events and picnics exist as occasions for them to get together is a contribution to the cohesiveness and dialogue of the growing art community who have abandoned the fashion frenzy of the Big Apple. So many artists are finding refuge in nature I often joke that the hills are alive with sound of paintbrushes and buzz saws.

— Barbara Rose, 2013

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