Weaving Gallery
The Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Museum of Design was previously a mansion that has been repurposed to work as a design museum with interactive exhibitions of different mediums. The objective of the exercise was to propose an extension for this museum along with a curatorial statement. This statement had to carry a series of objects for an extended exhibition and the extension had to architecturally express the concept of color as a mechanism that emphasizes that curatorial statement. In the end, color was not viewed as a symbolic tool, but as an organizational or mapping tool. The color red could mean anything, but it was more so the arrangement of the colors themselves that would lead the project.
Proposing a curatorial statement interested in textiles and weaving, the material properties of the brick were considered as a malleable object. The brick is one of the key features of the design of the existing mansion. What would happen if we used the brick as a modular mechanism for guiding our curatorial statement? This gave birth to the design of the Weaving Gallery. The Gallery connects the various floors of the Cooper-Hewitt museum through a spatial experience that weaves through the existing configuration. Across this extension, bricks extend, transform and change color depending on architectural and curatorial moments. Various brick modules were designed so as to streamline and organize this color exercise.