Project 3

Gallery and Apartment in Newtown

Model

My Gallery on King St in Newtown displays sculptures, paintings and films. My design ideas were brought about by focusing on these three forms of art.

As you first enter the gallery you get a view right through the bottom level of the gallery and through a window you can see up to the courtyard, however you can see no artworks due to the solid walls. I put the workshop at the front of the gallery so that the visitor must proceed through this room first before seeing the artworks, so that the visitor could get a feel of the artists work behind the scenes and get them in the design frame of thinking.

I decided that each artwork, no matter what the form, should have its own designated space- a room which would make you view the artwork as an individual piece- not effected by anything else. As a result i chose to create a room of rooms for my sculptures. Each room was shaped to foster the individual sculpture. I also wanted to make it so that when the visitor leaves the room of one sculpture they enter a void space where they can see no other artworks and are given walking time to reflect on the artwork they have just seen without being distracted by other artworks. The variety of rooms with sculptures are shown below:

For my artworks i wanted to put each artwork on a seperate wall so that each painting was given a feeling of individuality. The walls of this room i angled to mimic the line of the street.

For my film room i wanted to create a small solid dark place. I contrasted this with the void pyramid space above it. This space acts as a connection/disconecction from the courtyard to the apartment. One can see into the apartment from the courtyard vice versa, but never reach it.

The front facade is plain to fit into the site and adjacent buildings with four windows and a door. The two top windows show a glimpse of the gallery with two of the paintings. Then below on the right you can see into the workshop. Seeing through these three windows the visitor is given an idea on what the art gallery is like and they can then choose whether they want to proceed to buy a ticket from the fourth window (which is where the office is) or not.

Perspective of the front of the building

Left side long section

Right side long section

Site

I chose a site in the centre of newtown in a busy shopping area of King St. The site is two sites adjacent to each other (9m wide and 40m deep) and backs onto a lane allowing easy access for deliveries.

Site plan