New York, where StoreFront began in 1982, was a city resistant to straightforward categorisation. The shock of the 1975 fiscal crisis still lingered, and traces remained of a city left neglected as industry and population moved away, while at the same time capital was beginning to flow back into the city, particularly through finance and real estate. This instability also affected the ways in which culture was produced. By the 1980s, alternative spaces in New York such as The Kitchen, Artists Space, and P.S.1 were already experimenting with exhibitions, performances, artistic practices, and encounters outside museums and commercial galleries, while similar alternative activities were also flourishing in the field of architecture, where opportunities for professional practice were limited.

Always a Little Closer to Utopia: BIG

 

The goal that crystalised after many conversations was to create a scalable, flexible, sustainable, healthy, and inspiring workplace that put equal emphasis on focused work and vibrant collaboration. We solved this with a vast, flat, two-storey building—a lower floor as a bustling medina and a second floor as a shrine with 160-foot (about 48-metre) ceilings and great daylight and acoustics. Collaboration below and focus above. As opposed to a tower, the flatness opened up a lot of opportunities for ease of movement and visibility. It also allowed us to cover the skin in ‘dragonscale’ photovoltaics and sink geothermal piles to power the whole building. As a testament to the flexibility of the structure, the spatial organisation was reworked many times over during Coronavirus Disease-19 pandemic and ‘return-to-work’ years.

 

Park Kyong (1955‒) served as Co-Artistic Director of the Korean Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Biennale. It is less widely known that his career trajectory began more than forty years ago at StoreFront for Art and Architecture (hereinafter StoreFront). StoreFront, the alternative exhibition space in New York that Park, who trained in architecture, founded in his late twenties and led for sixteen years, was a dynamic laboratory for thinking about the city through architecture and raising social issues to the attention of public debate. The exhibitions and projects it presented through multilayered collaborations with architects, artists, and curators from around the world who were then beginning to gain recognition in the 1980s and 1990s came to be seen not as one-off events but as initiatives with wide social impact.

Always a Little Closer to Utopia: BIG

 

"I find the Suzhou gardens fascinating and paradoxical. They look natural but are intensely curated. They feel boundless but adopt small footprints relative to the experiences they create. For me, the gardens are defined by a recurring sense of revelation and delight upon turning a corner. In the Suzhou MoCA, it was important that the garden was something to be discovered and not immediately understood. This was something of a paradox for us, as the architectural organisation was strictly defined by orthogonally laid out ribbons that become both pavilions and walkways. From the Ferris wheel, the gardens appear as a series of individual picture frames—separate objects with their own identities and boundaries. However, once inside you realise that it’s an illusion and the gardens flow into one another. The views become layered—the pavilion corners become compressed passages, leading to framed openings, and then release into a larger landscape. The exploration of the gardens becomes the experience."

Always a Little Closer to Utopia: BIG

 

"I’d describe our philosophy of architecture as utopian pragmatism. Utopia is a place so perfect it can only exist in fiction or imagination. Pragmatism, on the other hand, deals with the world as it actually is, with all its irregularities and imperfections. Combine the two and something happens: whenever we design a space or a place, we try to bring that little corner of the world closer to its dream version. The dream is always specific, so our dream world in Seoul is very different from our dream world in Copenhagen, which is different again from our dream worlds in Italy or New York."