“What is the purpose of architecture? Materiality or spirituality?” These were some of the prompts Kyong Park—the Korean-American artist, architect, activist, and founder of Storefront for Art and Architecture—prepared ahead of a 1988 discussion he organized at the nonprofit art space on the topic of public architecture and private development. As many of us do at certain stages in life, I have been thinking a lot about how spirituality can offer a path to a more enriching and intentional way of living. But before visiting Storefront’s latest exhibition, Public Space in a Private Time, I hadn’t given much thought to architecture in the spiritual sense, which I take to mean a deep feeling of aliveness, compassion, and connectedness to our environment, ourselves, and others. Today’s New York doesn’t inspire inklings of connectedness; in many ways, it seems designed to increase discomfort and isolation.
Park founded Storefront with R.L. Seltman forty years ago in a ten-foot-by-twenty-one-foot storefront at 51 Prince Street, when SoHo was in full transition from an enclave of bohemian artists to the epicenter of the contemporary art scene. One could argue that it was around this time that New York’s architecture began its rapid spiritual descent in earnest. In 1980, two years prior to Storefront’s opening, the city gave Donald Trump an astounding forty-year tax break, which made possible his first solo project as a real estate developer, the Grand Hyatt hotel on 42nd Street. (In 2016, the New York Times estimated that Trump had reaped $360 million in unforgiven or uncollected taxes.) To claw itself out of bankruptcy, the city had granted financiers and developers unprecedented power to shape the urban landscape, indulging their relentless exploitation of taxpayer subsidies. Thus began a winnowing of the public sphere and architecture’s singleminded drive toward luxury, social status, and wealth.
In seeking to combat this tendency, Park and Seltman established an open forum where artists, architects, writers, and the like could gather to conceptualize and create alternative approaches to spatial design. These methods, as evinced by the written and graphic archival materials on display as part of Public Space in a Private Time, were rooted in research, advocacy, and organizing. The show also illustrates how the scrappy gallery and performance space managed to evolve with the times as a pivotal New York City countercultural institution. Taken together, the abundance of ephemera gives the sense of a robust creative community attentive to both local struggles and geopolitical conflict, fighting tirelessly against the erasure of civic space.
It’s easy to see how experimental artistic practice and on-the-ground activism defined the tenor of Storefront during its first two decades. But given the dissimilarity among texts and imagery (the formats range from the graphic arts to marginalia), the show does require a fair amount of concentration for one to fully latch on. Nevertheless, there is a great deal here to learn—not just about Storefront, but also about New York. Early projects were concerned with calling attention to injustice and uplifting the city’s urban spirit. For example, Gowanus Canal Redefined (1982) solicited critical architectural reinterpretations of Brooklyn’s Gowanus area, which suffered severe neglect and had a multitude of under-used factory buildings; Adam’s House in Paradise (1984) called for alternative housing designs to save guerrilla gardener Adam Purple’s concentrically designed and ever-evolving community garden on the Lower East Side from demolition by the New York City Housing Authority; for Homeless at Home (1985), fifty artists raised awareness of the state of homelessness by spray-painting images and messages on the city’s streets.
During the 1980s, Storefront went out of its way to promote rising architects (Liz Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, then operating as Diller + Scofidio) and artists (Dan Graham, Jenny Holzer). Group and solo exhibitions imagined new urban futures as well as radical, maybe even unbuildable, architectural designs. These could be witheringly critical or playfully irreverent, but many were made expressly to counter questionable city developments. This tactic became something of a gallery tradition, so that by 1985, a call for alternatives to Michael Graves’s addition to the Whitney Museum of American Art could generate seventy fantastical responses, including one by Christo, which, naturally, proposed to wrap the brutalist building in cloth and twine. Storefront expanded its reach beyond its tiny Prince Street outpost through interdisciplinary forums, symposia, and reports. One such program was ECO-TEC, an international sustainability forum that convened seven times between 1992 and 1999, bringing together scientists, philosophers, filmmakers, and urban planners to widen the notion of ecology to include aspects of culture, society, and history.
Storefront approached serious topics with buoyancy and a sometimes tongue-in-cheek attitude. Perhaps the most obvious eccentricity is the venue itself at 97 Kenmare Street, which features a hundred foot-long windowless exterior designed in 1993 by architect Steven Holl and multimedia artist Vito Acconci. The story of their collaboration constitutes a section of its own in the exhibition. Across the facade, Holl and Acconci created hinged openings, shaped like irregular puzzle pieces, that pivot to function as entryways, benches, tables. Drawings, schematic designs, and photography lend a richer understanding of the avant-garde outlook behind this unusual design, which passersby might easily presume to be a mere quirk. Instead, the facade is an embodiment of Storefront’s conviction that art and architecture should be at the center of public life, facilitating connection and engagement between exhibitions and the streetscape.
In recollecting Storefront’s founding mission, Public Space in a Private Time reminds viewers of the power and possibilities of community activism and unfettered creativity. Ultimately, the institution’s goal was a spiritual one: to resist dependence on the material by imagining environments that could help people feel part of something bigger than themselves. For this same reason, I left the exhibition a little crestfallen. New York has arguably always been a hostile place, but at points in its history, it offered the resources for communities of likeminded individuals to form, nurture, and grow. As the city has been privatized within an inch of its life, those resources have been stripped away or left unreplenished. Perhaps this is the reason for Storefront’s dwindling influence since the early 2000s. Or maybe it compounded problems arising from leadership changes after Park’s departure as director in 1998. Either way, current director José Esparza Chong Cuy’s decision to exclude material from the past two decades feels like a tacit admission that the organization lacks the civic gravitas it once enjoyed. Lacking that, we would be justified in asking whether Storefront has fully retreated from its initial aims.
Storefront’s rich history of social advocacy was new to me. I began visiting the gallery about a decade ago, but its seeming dedication to academic concerns and theory-driven design put me off. Directors past and present, as well as stakeholders, all run within the same elite circles of enormously endowed cultural institutions. (Many board members are current or former faculty from schools including the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation; Princeton School of Architecture; and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, as well as museums such as the Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum, and the Jewish Museum.) With every passing exhibition or panel discussion, the gallery’s public grows smaller, leaving little room for concerned citizens and activists. In light of the legacy celebrated by Public Space in a Private Time, Storefront’s current iteration seems all the more hollow—how can an organization comprising representatives from primarily private institutions truly connect with the greater public on matters of the built environment?
In the same bundle of provocations Park prepared for the 1988 discussion, he wrote that the city had “presented itself as a large parcel of real estate, not a community, and opened itself to the highest bidders.” The degree to which this situation—one of an exclusive focus on material gain—has worsened in the subsequent decades is deeply unsettling. Soaring skyscrapers with half-vacant luxury residences and offices dominate the skyline in an indelible picture of privatization’s triumph over public life. Thinking of Diller + Scofidio’s trajectory from Storefront to Hudson Yards, I wonder if this fate awaits talented architects practicing in the city as soon as “success” enters their thoughts. Park didn’t beat around the bush, asking, “Can architects make any difference?” If we continue to view materiality as architecture’s purpose, I am afraid they cannot.