Institutional Concept Design Goals Vision

Institutional Concept

Design Goals & Vision

New York City is home to over a hundred museums, galleries, and cultural venues. This set of sites is akin to a complex ecosystem of institutions of varying sizes, histories, and audiences. Our Museum, “The Market Gallery,” provides a sampling of the city’s numerous institutions by curating a collection of public-facing exhibition spaces which existing cultural institutions occupy in order to promote themselves, create new art, or reach out to a new audience. Like a 19th century market, this museum provides an immersive, organizing armature into which numerous other parties plug-in to produce, display, and exhibit their work. The Market Gallery is inspired by its unique site characteristics. Located on a curious corner at the intersection between 34 th Street, a major axis of tourist retail infrastructures, and Madison Avenue, an emerging design district supporting numerous new and established design showrooms, the museum responds to desires of tourists and New Yorkers alike through referencing the building’s unique history as a department store. The site demands of this institution an engaging and welcoming environment as well as variety and ephemerality to invite frequent informal visits. Through the inclusion (or curation) of wellestablished, historic museums alongside smaller, alternative cultural institutions, and, critically, their juxtaposition on equal footing, the Market Gallery challenges the hegemony of the well-endowed. The Guggenheim’s allotted space may, for example, be situated beside an emerging hybrid gallery/studio established in the Bronx last year. The Market Gallery encourages that the gallery spaces it hosts be active, ever-changing, and dynamic venues. Custom, site-specific installations are preferred over static works which visitors may have already seen. The physical production of art, allowed for by the flexibility of these spaces as working-studios, is another method in which member-museums may sponsor emerging voices while simultaneously representing themselves. The Market Gallery stipulates only that all exhibition programming be temporary in order to contribute to the ever-changing nature of the experience. Like a market, the Market Gallery is a casual, dynamic space of controlled cacophony, with the numerous voices of New York’s art institutions represented in diverse, interconnected spaces. The circulation design of such a building

supports easy movement but also facilitates the social functions of what may become a continuous opening party. By responding the demands of the immediate neighborhood and the history of the building, the Market Gallery can become, to embrace rather than resist terms of consumerism, a “one-stopshop” which allows tourists to experience something of the city’s numerous museums in one place while also letting New Yorkers keep track of the numerous cultural programming happening all over the city.