Since Annabelle Selldorf opened her office in 1988, she has attracted gallery owners and museum clients who admire her chaste modern architecture as a proper setting for displaying art. Her subtle, minimalist interiors allow painting, sculpture, and objets d’art to stand on their own without succumbing to “architorture.” Her approach stems from a nonaggression pact with works on display, as shown in New York’s Neue Galerie (PDF) or the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. In recent years, Selldorf Architects has designed whole buildings for galleries—such as the David Zwirner Gallery on West 20th Street in Chelsea—and their exteriors evoke Adolf Loos’s early 20th-century houses, with a taut, volumetric play of the planar and the plain.
Upon hearing that Selldorf was doing another ground-up gallery structure, this time for Hauser & Wirth nearby on West 22nd Street, some wondered if she would reprise Zwirner’s materials of creamy beige board-formed concrete and teak for door and window frames. But no. “David [Zwirner] and Iwan [Wirth] are friends and competitors,” Selldorf says of her two frequent clients. “You want to make sure the different character of the two operations is expressed.”
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