Name: New Contemporary Art Museum

Location: Buenos Aires, Argentina

Team: Jodi Batay-Csorba, Andrew Batay-Csorba

Project Area: 8,700 sqft

Project Year: 2012

Client: Buenos Aires Art Museum

Project Status: Competition


PROJECT DESCRIPTION

The New Museum takes advantage of the long and narrow dockside context in which it is embedded and compresses the program into a volume that reinforces the linearity and edge condition produced by the warehouse buildings. The resulting compressed building mass opens up half of the site providing a large public plaza fronting the building on the east side and connecting the existing boardwalk. The mirrored building skin mimics its surroundings within its distorted surface topography and resonates with the cities beloved history.


By extending the idea of a walled sculpture garden and surrounding the public plaza to the east of the building, a 3,000 sqm urban gallery is created. Elevating the walls of the urban gallery and extending them to the water’s edge force boardwalk pedestrians to intersect through this new gallery space. The “urban galleries” 80’ high walls, elevated 12’ above the plaza are subdivided into a series of gallery spaces that hover above pedestrians at the scale of the city.


In compressing the building volume to reflect its contextual surroundings, the building resolves itself into an optimum 60’gallery width. The gallery machine is organized into a series of linear homogeneous layers, each with their own distinctive gallery typology and performance characteristics. Within this layered strata of galleries the fourth floor day lit ribbon gallery acts sectionally as a series of stalactites, connecting the 3 subsequent layers below with a series of double and triple height spaces. This organizational system provides specific opportunities whereby the gallery viewer can interface with the ribbon typology and its varying light filled sectional properties while immersed within the linear galleries below.


The circulation system moves through a glazed environment allowing one to view the backside of the urban galleries projection screens in one instance and in another case penetrating into the urban gallery spaces through a series of mirror glazed bridges immersing the visitor within the urban gallery experience.

Using Format