Structure can be said to be the bones of architecture.
But should it, just as our skeletons are concealed within our human body, be hidden from sight? Or can it be expressed and married with architecture itself.
Project Title: Chris Burden Gallery
Building Type: Art Gallery & Museum
Site/Location: Dallas, Texas
Country: USA
Design Intent
The Chris Burden Gallery was designed to enhance the experience of Chris Burden’s art. The art gallery complements, as opposed to competes with the seminal works of this important American conceptual artist. Burden pushes the limits of art by challenging conventions and utilizing machines as extensions of the human body, the purest form of art. His work, primarily sculptures, focuses on the expression of structure in its raw form, stripping away all superficial ornamentation away and allowing the castellated columns and joints themselves to become both structure and decorum.
The gallery appropriates and deploys existing forms from its local context, just south of downtown Dallas, combining formal inspiration drawn from the surrounding warehouses and utility lines with themes drawn from Burden’s own work.
Each Burden’s work is located in its own gallery space that is suspended within the megastructure. The sequence of galleries are arranged in an exhilarating, rapidly evolving promenade achieved through making stark contrast in terms of height, texture and light, heightening the sensorial experience of the visitors.
Upon reaching the climax of the journey, the visitor is rewarded with a panaromic view of Dallas, including downtown to the north and Santiago Calatrava’s Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge to the south.
architectureman 