North Hill
Fung + Blatt Architects, Inc.
LOCATION
945, North Hill Street, Los Angeles, CA, United States
TYPE
Commercial › Retail
Developed in the 1940s, this portion of LA’s Chinatown has historically sported a public face that invited the outside world, and a back stage where families lived and labored, where the living had sometimes spilled into the alleys and plazas.
This urban pattern of use has, in the last decade, invited a wave of artists and gallery-ists to the area.
Through a grant from the Community Redevelopment Agency, our client invited us to help redefine the building for a new generation of use.
Addressing memory and re-inventing boundaries were the thematic substrates that guided this project.
We started by striping the building down to its concrete structural shell and introducing a lighter infill of cabinetry and movable walls, thereby articulating a reading of relative permanence.
The tall volume of the main gallery counterpoints the intimate art-viewing areas and mezzanine workspaces tucked away from public view.
At the storefront façade, shifted planes of glass and steel create a perception of depth.
An indoor-outdoor transitional space into the gallery and to the apartment above dissolves edge of where the street ended and where the interior space began.
A sliding and pivoting circular steel gate accommodates the gallery’s need for varying degrees of openness with playful reference to the changing phases of the moon.
