Firm： GLAVOVIC STUDIO

Type： Commercial › Exhibition Center Cultural › Cultural Center Gallery Sculpture

STATUS： Built

YEAR： 2007

On a quiet street on the northern edge of downtown Fort Lauderdale, GLAVOVIC STUDIO created a resonating presence for a new paradigm: Girls’ Club, an artist studio, collection, gallery, foundation and quasi-public space. Francie Bishop Good, a well-known artist and collector of women’s art, and David Horvitz, her husband, started Girls’ Club to provide a nurturing space for women in art. GLAVOVIC STUDIO radically modified an existing two-story masonry building from 1984, adding a reconfigured façade layered with light, landscape, and materials from local craft-making techniques and industrial references, announcing the mission of the Girls’ Club. The façade is clad in resin panels, layered on adjusted steel framing that creates the illusion of a vertical landscape directly over the existing windows and wall. A thin veil of light creates the illusion of skin and stone. This concept of layering continues inside through the steel entrance; it unifies the artist and exhibition space. Materials, light, and color are explored providing an ideal environment for art and artists to exchange and the public purpose to unfold. A series of pivot walls are inserted to reconfigure the space as needed. Florida’s light is modified both vertically, horizontally, and through deep penetrations into the service spaces. A mezzanine is introduced to create an intimate space for an artist in residence, with a change in scale and point of view. This project explores issues of existing, adaptive use, public and private, the feminine and the domestic through color, layering of materials, point of view, intimacy, and adjustment. The projection of the image in relation to City Hall and the value ascribed to art are not incidental. Exterior landscape concepts merge in towards the building to integrate into the surfaces with indigenous species while natural light and layers play on the surfaces. Photography by Robin Hill and Paul Clemence.