Sperone Westwater Gallery

Sperone Westwater Gallery, is a contemporary art gallery, located at 257 Bowery, New York, NY, between Stanton and Houston Streets. The gallery stands one block north of the New Museum. The eight-story building, including a mechanical floor and basement, contains 20,000 square feet of gallery space with the lobby and the terraces for exhibitions. The main feature of this building is the Big Red Box, a 12-foot by 20-foot moving gallery.

History

Sperone Westwater Fischer was founded in 1975, when Italian art dealer Gian Enzo Sperone, Angela Westwater, and German art dealer Konrad Fischer opened a space at 142 Greene Street in SoHo, New York. (The gallery's name was changed to Sperone Westwater in 1982.) An additional space was later established at 121 Greene Street. The founders' original program showcased a European avant-garde alongside a core group of American artists to whom its founders were committed. Notable early exhibitions include a 1977 show of minimalist works by Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, and Sol Lewitt; seven of Bruce Nauman's seminal early shows; eleven Richard Long exhibitions; and the installation of one of Mario Merz's celebrated glass and neon igloos in 1979—part of the gallery's ongoing dedication to Arte Povera artists, including Alighiero Boetti. Other early historical exhibitions at the Greene Street space include a 1989 group show, "Early Conceptual Works," which featured the work of On Kawara, Bruce Nauman, Alighiero Boetti, and Joseph Kosuth, among others; a 1999 Fontana exhibition titled "Gold: Gothic Masters and Lucio Fontana"; and selected presentations of work by Piero Manzoni. From May 2002 to May 2010, the gallery was located at 415 West 13 Street, in a 10,000-square foot space in the Meatpacking District.

In September 2010, Sperone Westwater inaugurated a new Foster + Partner designed building at 257 Bowery in New York. Today, almost 35 years after its conception, the gallery continues to exhibit an international roster of prominent artists working in a wide variety of media.

Artists

Renowned American artists Bruce Nauman and Susan Rothenberg have been with Sperone Westwater since 1975 and 1987, respectively. They are joined by established and internationally recognized artists, including Carla Accardi, Barry X Ball, Guillermo Kuitca, Richard Long, Malcolm Morley, Evan Penny, Peter Shelton, William Wegman and Not Vital, as well as a younger generation of artists like Bertozzi & Casoni, Wim Delvoye, Kim Dingle, Charles LeDray, Tom Sachs, Jan Worst and Liu Ye.

Sperone Westwater also has in its inventory work by Carla Accardi, Alighiero Boetti, Lucio Fontana, Heinz Mack, Piero Manzoni, Mario Merz, Otto Piene, Julian Schnabel, Richard Tuttle, and ZERO Group.

Site & Context

The Bowery is a neighborhood located in southern Manhattan. It is a part of East Village and surrounded by Chinatown on the south, the Lower East Side on the east and Little Italy on the west. The East Village is known for its night scenes, diverse community, and artistic sensibility. However, the neighborhood’s dynamic started to change due to recent gentrification.

The Bowery, had been an area that was mainly used by common people and had a gritty culture; it became very well known in the 80s and 90s as the home of rock and roll clubs as well as homeless shelters and a whole bunch of colorful characters. This change sparked further gentrification that like other working-class neighborhoods in New York City changed The Bowery. The architecture gradually changed from traditional and low rise brick buildings to luxury condos and fancy art galleries around the time the Sperone Westwater Gallery was built. Lisa Phillips, the director of The New Museum, which opened three years before the Sperone Westwater Gallery, defined this change in the neighborhood as “The Bowery Renaissance.”^[1]

In the 1890s, the Bowery was notorious for prostitution and gay and lesbian bars. Along with the “Pimp Row” on Second Avenue, the Bowery was the center of depravity and transgression.^[2] Also, the area was filled with cheap clothing stores, lodging-houses and bars. After Prohibition in 1919, however, many saloons and bars closed down and were replaced by other businesses, including restaurant supply stores that survive to this day. The building that occupied the site of the Sperone Westwater Gallery was an abandoned restaurant-supply shop.^[3]

Starting in the 1990s the neighborhood began to change very rapidly. Since 2005, high-rise condominiums and luxury apartment complexes were built alongside the old, rundown buildings. The Whole Foods Market and New Museum, which moved into the area, are also clear marks of gentrification.

One indicator of gentrification is this situation. The Sperone Westwater Gallery is the third building on The Bowery designed by a Pritzker prize-winning architect. The first one was New Museum designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA in 2007, and the second was 41 Cooper Square by Thom Mayne of Morphosis in 2009.^[4]

The New York State Register of Historic Places named The Bowery as Bowery Historic District in October 2011. A proposal has been floated to ask the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission to declare the street an historic district, but it is unlikely to succeed.

Architects

The design team, Norman Foster + Partners, is based in London. Foster, the principal, founded the firm in the name of Foster Associates in 1967 and reestablished it as Norman Foster + Partners in 1990s. Foster was awarded the 1999 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the Pulitzer of the architecture field. His firm has built work all over the world and in New York City, has completed the Hearst Tower in midtown Manhattan and is currently in negotiations for the renovation of Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.^[5]

Form & Use

The building concept

According to the architect, the Sperone Westwater Gallery is “a response to The Bowery’s dynamic urban character and a desire to rethink the way in which we engage with art.”^[6] The most striking feature of the building is the inventive use of a freight elevator for space extension. This elevator creates a dramatic experience for the person entering the gallery and also distinguishes the exterior form in a striking way.

The massing of the nine-story building steps back after rising vertically for the first five stories. This is a typical building diagram in New York City as a result of zoning regulations. If you walk around the city of Manhattan for a day, you will see this building form often. The space is unique in that many art galleries in New York City occupy more generous floor plans that allow curators to reconfigure architectural elements to allow a more varied engagement with the work, while the Sperone exists as a series of small galleries that can be expanded by the use of the freight elevator.

The building’s most prominent feature, the Ferrari-red elevator, moves along the steel frame structure and is operated by a system of hydraulic pistons.^[7] The bottom of the elevator serves as the moving ceiling of the lobby. This makes the lobby space unique and innovative unlike any other building lobby. However, the elevator does not reach the ground floor.^[8] The walls of the lobby are made of cast-in-place concrete. Steel rails are cast into the concrete to allow the elevator to move up and down, and the mass of the hydraulic cylinder and pistons are exposed on the ground floor. This exposure of mechanical equipment is fitting considering the industrial nature of the surrounding area. The 15-foot by 20-foot elevator, a windowless, room-like space, is very characteristic of its use: its purpose is not to transport people but to extend the gallery space. Depending on the exhibition, it may be opened and stay put at any floor between the second to the fifth. The provocative outside appearance of the red-box beyond laminated glass facade is not indicative of what is inside.

The main exhibition space between the ground and the second floor is arranged as a mezzanine. It could feel narrow and cramped because of the 25-foot by 100-foot dimension, which is unusually small for a gallery space. This lot size is typical in New York City. On the Bowery, most buildings were once three to four stories tall and the 25 foot by 100 foot lot made sense. For a tall building such as this, the narrow lot can be constricting. However, various architectural features add breathing room as well as providing interesting views from within. Skylights are placed on the exposed roof of the first floor to the east, the double-height mezzanine, which opens the central space from 13 ceiling height to 27 foot ceiling height, creates enough room for enormous sculptures and provides the visitor with a more interesting perspective of the work placed in this double-height space, which they don’t normally get.^[9]

The lighting scheme of The Sperone Westwater Gallery is one of the main architectural features. For designing the LED lights for the gallery’s facade, Buro Happold, international multidisciplinary engineering consultancy, received an Award of Excellence at the 28th Annual International Association of Lighting Designers (IALD) International Lighting Design Awards.^[10] The LED spotlights the elevator as if it is a piece of art itself. As the red-box elevator moves along its exterior wall, the state-of-the-art tight-beam linear LED light changes angles to follow the elevator from top to bottom. Thus, the elevator serves the dual-purpose of being an exhibition space and a spectacle.

Unlike other typical galleries, The Sperone Westwater Gallery is rather uninviting to a passerby. First of all, the entrance, which is made of heavy corrugated black metal panels,^[11] partly covers the inside views. The signboard on the entrance says ‘SPERONE WESTWATER’ without any indication of it being a gallery. As a result, the building feels exclusive to the public.

Materials and Methods of Construction

The Sperone Westwater Gallery is a steel and concrete structure clad in glass and metal panels that is supported on a concrete foundation. The west facade, the main entrance, is made of milled laminated glass on a rigid frame system, and the east facade is composed of a corrugated black metal panel system and transparent glass.

Innovative technical details make the building energy-efficient and well-suited for the surrounding urban environment. The black aluminum cladding on both the north and south facades helps protect the artworks inside from heat and humidity.^[12] The space that houses the elevator, or moving gallery, is utilized as a buffer zone that protects the gallery space from extreme temperature and street noise outside.^[13]

The interior of this gallery consists of a rich combination of materials and features. Small glass windows at the back of the ground level exhibition space let in natural light. The sinuous glass balustrade of the mezzanine divides the tall narrow space of the first and the mezzanine (which is also the second) floor, is in an interesting geometrical shape. Also, the building exposes mechanical parts and incorporates them into the interior. The pistons that operate the red elevator are exposed and stand in the lobby.

The owner Angela Westwater once said of the gallery, “a big white box, we’re not.”^[14] With its innovative division of space and use of material, the Sperone Westwater Gallery differentiates itself from the typical Chelsea galleries of large open spaces surrounded by white walls.

Sustainable Design

During the initial phase of design, the architects were limited by the constraints of the tiny site. With only 25 linear feet of storefront space, the architects on the project made a conscious effort to incorporate significant amounts of day lighting into the project. Creating a glass facade was important to allowing natural light to enter deep into the space of the galleries. They also designed large openings at the back of the building to add extra day lighting and to cut down on the use of artificial light. This is a difficult task in a gallery where you have sensitive artwork. Also, in small urban sites, Foster realized the importance of maximizing every square foot.

Significance

The introduction of this type of building to the Bowery district is a sign of the future of the East Village. Once a gritty neighborhood filled with struggling artists, rock and roll musicians, the homeless, and people of all creeds and colors, the Bowery is becoming a luxury district. The scale and character of the streets is evaporating for spaces such as these that, while architecturally very interesting, publicly, are much less so. If we want to continue to invite star architects to design in New York City, we must be sure everyone involved understands the implications of constructing buildings that do not relate to the surrounding neighborhood in constructive ways.

References

Coordinates: 40°43′24″N 73°59′33″W / 40.72320°N 73.99263°W / 40.72320; -73.99263