-
Architects: N H D M Architects
- Area: 12000 ft²
- Year: 2017
-
Photographs:Nam June Paik Art Center
Text description provided by the architects. The Nam June Paik Art Center renovation project reconfigures approximately 12,000 sf of the existing museum (about one-third of the publicly accessible area) and provides the public with new ways to interpret, linger, exchange, and inhabit the institution. Experimenting with the idea of “building in a building” and a “figure in a figure,” the project explores the typological approach to appropriate underutilized institutional spaces for more flexible and transformative public use.
Open Ground, the new entry floor of the museum is designed around three large-scale programmatic zones with strong figural and spatial characteristics - New Environment for Paik’s “TV GARDEN (1974)”, the Project Gallery (for emerging artists’ experimental exhibits), and the Workshop Circle (for new public programs) - and it aims to promote extended durations and multifarious ways that the public interacts with the art and its stories. Forming a new institutional interface with the public, three independent figures allow for simultaneous yet autonomous programming while the careful open composition fosters unpredictable exchanges and new curatorial potentials. Combined with supplementary mobile elements, the figures also frame additional user amenities.
The Flux NJP Play Room, located on the second floor, is a space for user-guided learning and exploration designed with media integrated custom furnishings and the infrastructure for moving image projections and other future technologies. Built in the underutilized residual spaces around the circulation core in a minimum and unusual footprint, the room provides a space of solitude and of intimacy with the learning material amid the expansive open gallery that occupies most of the floor. The geometry of the wall delineates immersive surfaces for media projections and unexpected spaces for group or personal use while producing a new scale obscuring the perception of its confines.
