Winner of Van Alen's Ground/Work Competition Announced

John Hill

30. September 2013

Image courtesy of Van Alen Institute

Collective-LOK's "Screen Play" is selected for the Van Alen Institute's new street-level space.

Two years after New York's Van Alen Institute opened its eponymous, LOT-EK-designed bookstore in the building it owns on West 22nd Street (the only architecture bookstore in NYC), the institution has announced the winning design to transform its ground-floor space into a flexible venue for its offices, events, exhibitions, and the bookstore. The winning design, "Screen Play," comes from Collective-LOK, a trio made up of Jon Lott, William O'Brien Jr., and Michael Kubo. Construction begins in winter 2013/14.

Image courtesy of Van Alen Institute

The winning team's description of the screens:
"The project employs five types of screen play to enable and give shape to the broadest possible range of uses. Along the east face, a polycarbonate wall of fixed and sliding panels masks a dense poché of private and semi-private programs, producing a figure in plan that is calibrated along its length to accommodate different scales of use from work areas to public events. Above, a synthetic ceiling houses projectors, track and fluorescent lighting, acoustic cones, and mechanical equipment within a module that inverts the traditional heavy coffer into an ethereal geometry of suspended scrims that both obscure and reveal what lies above. Along the west wall, a long niche provides a panoramic screen for continuous multi-projection as well as uninterrupted wall space for exhibition display, seating, and storage. Mirrored exterior screensextend the space outward to include the mobile street seat in front and an outdoor terrace in back, doubling the facade to create a layered threshold from the city into the institutional space of the Van Alen. Translucent interior scrims can be lowered from the ceiling to bracket different programmatic areas, allowing the scale of spaces to be controlled for curatorial and staff needs."