Kips Bay Boys & Girls Club Show House Installation

Project Details

Project Description

FROM THE ARCHITECTS:

We were granted a unique opportunity to participate in the pro-bono design and execution of the 2014 Kips Bay Boys & Girls Club Design Show House. We took a sweeping central space in the venerable Villard Mansion by McKim, Mead and White. Architectural insertions engage with the existing space resulting in a new, layered composition, architecture which functions as an assemblage. Our temporary installation in the grand hall linked six other rooms and became The Salon, a gathering place and a meeting space to debate inspiring art, design and their intersections.

A series of whitened frames ring two areas of the room. Ceiling, wall and floor serve as a foil to the neoclassical order of the room. Metallic painted portions of the frame and adjacent historic structure are backlit in order to literally highlight the juxtaposition. The metallic band carries throughout the bespoke carpet and ceiling. The result is a space with an intriguing tension between old and new, found and created.

A series of custom benches inspired by the geometries of the existing room and tension of circulation are placed within the frames. Rift-cut white oak with copper or lacquer-clad interiors are inserted as spaces unto themselves, offering another perspective to the surrounding room and the art.

Chosen art work complements the marriage of art and architecture. Pieces are by Stephane Couturier from his “Melting Point Series”. The inspiration of this series is about reconstruction and design, taking multiple images and splicing them together, superimposing them to make new images based on the artist’s re-imagination of his subject.

The room served as a research project and a fascination with the world beyond architecture in design. Each chosen and created element, small, medium or large, compliments or foils another, and in the best-case scenario, does both.