The Armory Show has been the quintessential New York City art fair since it premiered at the 69th Regiment Armory in present-day Murray Hill in 1913. Unlike other franchise fairs that travel to several locations, it’s hard to imagine the Armory Show taking place in any other city. Now held at Piers 94 and 92 on Manhattan’s west side, the fair’s interior architecture is not unlike the layout of the city it calls home. Last year, Brooklyn-based architects Bade Stageberg Cox, who have designed the Armory Show since 2012, took inspiration from New York’s grid plan for the fair’s interior; their design for a “grid of blocks, punctuated by open spaces that provide places of social interaction” was directly inspired by the fair’s Manhattan setting.
“Thresholds,” their theme for the design of this week’s Armory Show, builds on the urbanistic program of last year’s architecture with a distinctive twist — for 2014, Bade Stageberg Cox are using architecture to delineate the boundaries between New York City and the fair’s art city, creating spaces meant to facilitate the visitor’s thorough immersion in the art on display. By activating passageways, demarcating lounges, and simplifying circulation, the architects seek to transport Armory Show visitors beyond both the ceaseless hurry of New York City and the consuming rush of viewing and buying at an art fair.
By using interior architecture to slow visitors down, Bade Stageberg Cox seek to allow patrons to relish the art-viewing experience — and aim to mitigate the “fair fatigue” that often overwhelms visitors inside the endless rows of galleries at many art fairs. In order to create what principal Jane Stageberg calls a “mood shift” during the passage from the city to the fair, the architects have moved the ticket desk to what they call a “head house” at the end of a corridor just off the main 55th Street entrance. Whereas last year ticketing took place inside a corridor that opened directly onto the fair, this year visitors will traverse the corridor as a space of physical transition from the hurried realm of the city to the more harmonious environment of the fair. This corridor is the first of several thresholds that defines the experience of moving to and from inside this year’s Armory Show.
Inside the fair, the architects have interjected lounges and restaurants between galleries — eschewing the colored towers they built in 2012 and 2013 to alert visitors to the locations of lounges — to create simpler loops of circulation. The eight lounges inside Pier 94, where contemporary art will be sold, and the four inside the smaller Pier 92, devoted to Modern art — will serve as “neighborhood precincts,” as per Stageberg’s vision of the seating areas. Galleries, she explained, will be clustered around the parlors, so that a visitor can enjoy a brief respite before continuing to wander the aisles. The lounges will also cut through the aisles of galleries, so attendees can navigate between rows with ease (previously, viewers would have to navigate from the front to the back of a pier to enter an adjoining row of galleries).
Fellow principal Timothy Bade notes that the most intensive new feature focused on notions of passage and threshold is the interior stairway that connects Piers 94 and 92 (previously, visitors walked through a covered outdoor corridor to make the connection). The stairway, covered with a scrim (as are the lounges interspersed throughout the fair), will isolate viewers from art as they pass from higher to lower ground, offering an intimate space for reflection on artworks already viewed. The decision to use semi-transparent fabric to delineate public spaces of passage within the fair reflects the temporary nature of its set-up: the Armory Show runs a mere four days, from March 6 through March 9. The entire fair infrastructure is built and deconstructed — going “from emptiness to emptiness,” observed principal Martin Cox— in the span of a week.
Art fairs have only recently begun to hire designers to conceptualize their physical spaces with emphasis on optimizing circulation, visitor experience, and aesthetic organization through architecture — such questions were previously relegated to the realm of museum design. But by importing the questions that inform the design of permanent exhibition spaces for major institutions, BSC and the Armory Show assert that the art hung for a week on plywood walls can be just as important as the pieces displayed for years inside steel-and-glass galleries.