2022
MCHAP
Amant
SO – IL
Brooklyn, New York, United States
June 2021
AUTOR PRINCIPAL
Florian Idenburg (Principal-in-Charge), Jing Liu (Principal)
AUTOR CONTRIBUYENTE
Kevin Lamyuktseung (Senior Associate), Ted Baab (Senior Associate), Pietro Pagliaro (Designer), Lucia Sanchez-Ramirez (Designer), Kristen Too (Designer
CLIENTE
Lonti Ebers
FOTÓGRAFO
Iwan Baan
OBJETIVO
Amant is part of, benefits from, and contributes to the local community. Its formal and spatial relationship to its surroundings emphasizes this cohesion, maintaining a residential scale similar to adjoining buildings. Locally-sourced materials reference the area’s industrial heritage while rendering the buildings partly anonymous. Deeply textured form liners shape cast-in-place concrete. Bricks rotate out of plane to catch a shadow. Galvanized steel bars toy with reflection and transparency. These nestle comfortably within their manufacturing and industrial storage context, and, up close, offer surprising tactility, detail, and depth that betray the familiar and the everyday.
This versatile cultural incubator is composed of three new buildings and one adaptively reused existing structure. Amant functions both privately and publicly, housing artist studios, galleries, offices, storage, and a cafe. Each of its four buildings contributes a gallery unique in proportion, size, light quality, and infrastructure. The campus remains flexible to curation as a group or individually and facilitates programs ranging from technically demanding to large-scale to intimate.
The campus embraces porosity, with multiple entrances granting public access to the spaces within. Moments of compression between galleries release into lush green courtyards, offering unexpected quiet and serenity. These pockets of outdoor space perforate the journey through the site, providing moments for gathering and respite as well as opportunities for programming. Intended as a refuge from the bustling borough beyond its walls, Amant is an oasis for making, examining, and appreciating art and culture.
CONTEXTO
Amant is a privately funded project spread over three sites in an area of rapidly changing North Brooklyn known as the East Williamsburg Industrial Park. Once a bustling industrial center, the neighborhood saw a decline in the second half of the 20th century as both light and heavy industry left the area. Following a common urban trend, communities of artists began steadily populating the area’s increasingly empty warehouses, seeking inexpensive space for production, exhibition, and residence.
In recent years, North Brooklyn has developed an international reputation for its distinct artistic and cultural presence. Some of Amant’s nearby neighbors include music recording, photography, and gallery spaces, wedged between the meat markets and truck repair companies that still call the area home. Amant builds upon this trajectory of revitalization and reinvention, bringing an internationally-minded arts presence to an area whose influence has outgrown its borders.
Rather than an inward-looking space isolated from its urban context, our collection of distributed volumes weaves itself into the fabric of the city. Public routes channeled through large city blocks circulate the community in a new way. Courtyards and thoroughfares weave through and between existing buildings and make public functions sunk deep within accessible to all visitors beyond the more private spaces at the periphery. A community-minded institution at its core, Amant embraces porosity not only in its design but in its ethos. Exhibitions are always free to the public, and the publicly accessible cafe, bookstore and adjoining courtyard are open daily.
ACTUACIÓN
Since opening in the Summer of 2021, Amant has quickly become a destination for artistic and cultural enrichment. Over the course of its brief history, it has played host to a diverse range of exhibitions, performances and cultural conversations. From book launches to block parties, extended installations to fleeting musical performances, group shows to solo lectures, family storytimes to international film screenings, Amant has proved as versatile in its capacity as it was ambitious in its inception.
The indoor/outdoor nature of the campus in particular has presented opportunities to redefine how performance and exhibition engage with audience and space. Musicians gently drumming in a quiet courtyard march the audience to a defiant crescendo in the wide open street. A “porch” constructed in an outdoor pocket creates an intimate Brooklyn stoop for conversation and music. The annual Brooklyn Art Book Fair finds a new home, with Brooklyn’s art lovers and bibliophiles spilling out of galleries onto festive, buzzing streets.
Alongside its public offerings, Amant has played host to over 20 emerging and mid-career international artists with its residency program. Providing a robust stipend, dedicated studio space, and exhibition opportunities, the 3-month program is offered solely to artists not currently practicing in New York, providing many residents with their first opportunity to create and share work in the area. The neighborhood is, in turn, afforded the unique privilege of experiencing new perspectives firsthand as artists from around the globe bring their singular practices to an oasis in East Williamsburg.
