Amant is a cultural incubator located in the industrial area of North Brooklyn, SO - IL. It consists of an ensemble of four buildings spread over two city blocks and provides space for artists' studios, galleries, offices, a performance space and a café. Several entrances connect the site to the surrounding neighbourhood, while the outdoor areas provide a retreat from city life. The materials, which reflect the industrial heritage of the area, give the site a certain anonymity and surprise with their depth and vibrancy when viewed up close.
SO – IL
Iwan Baan, Naho Kubota
Amant spans three blocks in the rapidly changing, industrial North Brooklyn neighborhood. This innovative cultural incubator functions both privately and publicly, housing artists' studios, galleries, offices, a performance space and a café.
Central to Amant's design is the idea of an urban oasis, a space where the pace of art-making can be slowed to allow for experimentation and meaningful reflection. The campus engages with the site's eclectic post-industrial neighbourhood, while the organisation housed within encourages dialogue between artist, visitor and community.
Rather than being isolated from their urban context, the distributed volumes weave through the fabric of the city. Public routes through large blocks of the city create new means of circulation and discovery. Multiple entry points relate the site to the surrounding neighbourhood, while landscaped pockets of open space provide a refuge from the urban bustle. Courtyards and thoroughfares weave through and between existing buildings, leading visitors past more private spaces on the periphery to centrally located galleries and exhibitions.
Each of the four buildings in this collection contributes a gallery that is unique in proportion, scale, light quality and infrastructure. The porous campus remains curatorially flexible, allowing for diverse, technically challenging programming on large to intimate scales for local and international artists across disciplines.
Materials render the buildings partially anonymous. Deeply textured form liners shape the cast-in-place concrete. Bricks rotate out of plane to catch a shadow. Galvanised steel bars play with reflection and transparency. Each building nestles comfortably within its industrial context, offering surprising tactility, detail and depth up close, betraying the familiar and the everyday.
