DE MARIA PAVILION | Bridgehampton, New York | 2016

Architects: Gluckman Tang Architects
Client: Barnes & Noble, Inc.
Contractor: Wright & Co Construction Inc.

Located in Bridgehampton, NY, De Maria Pavilion occupies the south-eastern corner of an 11-acre estate originally constructed in 1912. After purchasing the property in the mid-1980’s, the client re-envisioned the estate as a walking sculpture garden for their large collection of contemporary art including pieces by Isamu Noguchi, Donald Judd, George Rickey, and Louise Nevelson.

Upon acquiring their most recent sculpture, “Large Grey Sphere” by Walter De Maria, a 9 foot tall, 32-ton granite sphere, the client turned to their architect to design a space for the artwork. Set in an unused 100’ x 200’ brick-walled rose garden, De Maria Pavilion is a 1,600-square-foot brick-and-concrete pavilion containing additional sculptures and drawings by Walter De Maria. Within the walls, the landscape design inverts the typical formal garden by reintroducing indigenous plantings: red cedars, bayberry, swamp white oaks and meadow grasses.

New gates adorn the original garden entrance, and oversize bluestone treads lead visitors down to a sunken patio of riverstone that runs the width of the pavilion’s west wall and arrives at a side entrance. Lowering the grade effectively levels the site around the pavilion, and reduces the apparent scale of the building inside the garden. At the east end of the building, the natural grade continues to pitch down through the garden, where “Large Grey Sphere” is elevated on a stepped, terrazzo ground-concrete pedestal, aligning it with the level of the pavilion terrace, and establishing a relationship between building and sculpture.

The brick facades of the pavilion reference the 1920s garden wall, while their color relates to the dark granite of “Large Grey Sphere”. Composed of twenty-four-inch long, dark grey bricks, the east and west faces are set in a random bond pattern with alternating courses corbeled to create linear shadow lines that emphasize the bricks’ horizontality. The brick at the north and south facades is split and set in a header-only random bond, resulting in a coarse, seemingly random texture.

A board-formed, concrete interior frames the art, and is day-lit by a large skylight and window-wall. Light levels are modulated by light-diffusing glazing, motorized shades, and a fixed scrim suspended above the Alaskan Yellow Cedar rafters that support the skylight. Lighting for evening use is concealed above the scrim, with the exception of two down-lights that illuminate the floor-mounted sculpture, “Equal Areas”, whose polished surface reflects the light onto the concrete ceiling, creating an unexpected double-image of the work at night.

Several of the De Maria Pavilion’s design elements reference the Noguchi Garden Pavilion, an earlier single-artist pavilion onsite, designed by the submitting architect in 2004, which accommodates eleven Isamu Noguchi sculptures. The Noguchi Pavilion’s Alaskan yellow cedar rafters and terrazzo ground concrete plinth were reintroduced as focal materials in the De Maria Pavilion, as was a strategy of orienting all the bricks in the façade in a single direction, an effect first used on the wood structural members in the Noguchi Pavilion.