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Floored!
Studio / Fall 2015 / Year 2 / Rice Architecture / Professor Lluis LinanCarl Andre Museum
- Floor-galleries, cafe, library, gift shop, amphitheater, administration
Carl Andre is a conceptual artist known for his minimalist sculptures and floor installations. Always sitting directly on the ground, his pieces inhabit space and invite a physical experience of art. Visitors are encouraged to meander through, step over, and walk across his pieces. Floored! presents a museum dedicated to Andre’s art, investigating the design of a museum for viewing floors instead of walls.
Echoing the object-field arrangements of Andre’s work, the museum is a configuration of independent programmatic volumes situated on a shared plinth, including lobbies, cafe, library, and administration. Six galleries for the permanent collection are sunken into the ground while remaining open to the plinth above. These visual voids provide an overhead look at the floor pieces, acting as downward viewing portals to generate a double-reality where the works can be viewed simultaneously from above as objects and experienced from within as fields. A seventh sunken gallery provides a space for temporary exhibitions and guest installations.
The sunken galleries are tailored to the dimensions of the permanent collection, cropping tightly to each piece. Active participation is immediately fostered: as visitors enter each space they find themselves already within or on top of the works, subverting the typical “precious” distanced museum experience. The remainder of the museum is fully underground flowing around the framed sunken galleries as a continuous open space from which visitors can shift from inside to outside, from open plan to tight crop, experiencing various field and floor conditions.
Permanent Collection: Glarus Copper Galaxy, 1995 / Cuts, 1967 / ALomoCU, 2000 / Black Wholes, 2005 / Aluminum Clouds, 2001 / Fair Oaks, 1968