A new gallery for Hauser & Wirth by Annabelle Selldorf

Architect Annabelle Selldorf, who specializes in the presentation of art, has now completed another project for the Hauser & Wirth gallery in the heart of New York. The five-storey gallery building has the usual minimalist look and offers plenty of space for installations.

In 1988, architect Annabelle Selldorf opened her own office after studying at the renowned Pratt Institute in New York. Since then, she has mainly worked for gallery owners, artists, museums and cultural institutions who value her minimalist architecture as an appropriate setting for the presentation of art. The prominent New York architect got her start in the New York art world as an assistant in the office of Richard Gluckman (Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, and Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin), who translated artistic minimalism into architecture and thus shaped the aesthetics of the successful gallery in Chelsea, the New York district that is considered a global hub for the art trade.

Annabelle Selldorf has made a name for herself internationally with the planning and interior design of apartments and penthouses. She is known for her rigorous understatement in her interiors. She places great emphasis on architectural principles: Scale, proportion, material and light. She uses her formal vocabulary sparingly.

Her calm and austere spaces always place art in the foreground. This is exemplified by the “Neue Galerie” – Ronald Lauder’s museum for German and Austrian art from the early 20th century on Fifth Avenue. Annabelle Selldorf discreetly redesigned the building and implemented a contemporary and museum-appropriate spatial and functional program during the renovation. Renowned New York architecture critic and Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Goldberger described the renovation as “gentle modernism with extreme precision and perfect proportions”.

For gallery owner David Zwirner, one of the most important protagonists of the international art trade for more than twenty years (son of Cologne gallery owner Rudolf Zwirner), Annabelle Selldorf designed a monumental new building made of rough exposed concrete in Chelsea, which was erected on the site of a former parking garage (2013). Works by Dan Flavin and Donald Judd, for example, are shown in the almost 3,000 square meter exhibition space.

Generously glazed openings

The architect, who specializes in the presentation of art, has now completed another project on 22nd Street. This time for the Swiss gallery owners Iwan and Manuela Wirth and Ursula Hauser. Hauser & Wirth, which is now active worldwide, has branches in Zurich, London, Somerset, New York, Los Angeles and Hong Kong and has signed contracts with popular artists (including Pipilotti Rist, Annie Leibovitz, Jorge Condo and Mark Bradford). Annabelle Selldorf has been associated with the influential art dealers, for whom she has already converted a former brewery complex in Zurich, an abandoned grain mill in Los Angeles and a listed bank building in London on Manhattan’s Upper East Side into art galleries, for decades.

Hauser & Wirth’s new gallery building in Chelsea now has over 3,000 square meters of exhibition space on five floors. The anthracite-colored block made of fly ash concrete stands in stark contrast to the red brick buildings in the neighborhood. Zinc panels and black-painted steel frames emphasize the minimalist look. The outer shell is interrupted by large glazed openings.

The first floor and second floor are equipped with 16 and twelve meter high sliding glass doors respectively. These can be folded away completely and the façade opened up. This brings the public into closer contact with the art on display. Column-free rooms of different sizes with polished concrete floors and white plastered walls provide ample space for installations. A bar and an event room on the second level can be used for artist talks and meetings. Further exhibition rooms and offices occupy the upper floors.

The highlight is the gallery on the fifth floor, which is over five meters high and has a large glazed skylight. This enables art handling by crane from the street into the building. “The new building for Hauser & Wirth developed from a close dialog that we have had with the gallery over many years and many different projects,” explains Annabelle Selldorf. “Together, we have created something here that will envelop people in art. Visitors will come across works of art again and again as they walk through the rooms. The installations will not be static, but will interact dynamically with the architecture.”

Selldorf’s well-proportioned rooms currently showcase works by master’s students from New York’s Hunter College, whose graduate program in fine arts is one of the ten best in the USA, in the exhibition “We Were Already Gone”.

You can find a portrait of Annabelle Selldorf in BAUMEISTER 8/2017 with the cover story: Where are the female architects?

If you would like to get an overview of Annabelle Selldorf’s portfolio, you should take a look here: Selldorf Architects, Portfolio and Projects, Phaidon, London/New York 2016, with full or double-page color photos by Todd Eberle, 95 euros