Art Masterplan

2006 - The Berkshires, MA, USA

Communal Studio Renovation

The proposed space is a home for the “Storefront Artists”, an artist collective that had operated its studios within a series of semi-abandoned downtown retail stores in Pittsfield, MA. These studios have helped spark the redevelopment of the downtown area, creating community and investor interest. In the move to a vacant school building, the relationships between the viewer and viewed; spectator and artist that exist for a storefront artist studio needed to maintained. The physical glass face that typically denotes the storefront is supplanted with the connective tissue of a displaced and unraveling threshold; one that extends through the city and binds the proposed artist studios with the rest of the streetscape. The typical pedestrian encounters a series of sidewalk cabinets, each cabinet containing a small cubby that houses an artist’s work. As the pedestrian studies the work, a small camera hidden in the cabinet observes their movements and reactions, sending the imagery into the studio for the artist to observe.

The pedestrian follows the trail of these sidewalk cabinets, and arrives at the interior of the storefront artist studios where the same threshold condition at the street is inverted slightly.