The Dairy Arts Centre is a not-for-profit venue founded by the art collectors Nicolai Frahm and Frank Cohen. The Dairy Arts Centre is located in central London at the end of a cobbled lane next to a very old park with which it shares a southernmost boundary wall. The project was completed in one year, from first enquiry to the inaugural show by John Armleder. Formerly a dairy depot, the assemblage of existing buildings and yards already promised a curatorial sequence of differentiated spaces for exhibition and event. A language for the dairy depot's appropriation developed as a distillation of the essence of each of the spaces through removal, relocation of the reusable, and intervention of the new only where there was a need for it. A family of fluorescent lighting details was developed to camouflage into the different ceiling and wall contexts. 7 rooms with 4 architectural typologies: top lit sheds with A-frame trusses, concrete flat roof with downstand beams, brick rooms, and a steel-framed dry-lined room. A material palette for new elements was kept deliberately colorless, using white, mirrored stainless steel, glass, and translucent multiwall polycarbonate, art-case plywood. An assembly of clear, solid, reflective, and translucent surfaces was ...
The Dairy Arts Centre is a not-for-profit venue founded by the art collectors Nicolai Frahm and Frank Cohen. The Dairy Arts Centre is located in central London at the end of a cobbled lane next to a very old park with which it shares a southernmost boundary wall. The project was completed in one year, from first enquiry to the inaugural show by John Armleder. Formerly a dairy depot, the assemblage of existing buildings and yards already promised a curatorial sequence of differentiated spaces for exhibition and event. A language for the dairy depot's appropriation developed as a distillation of the essence of each of the spaces through removal, relocation of the reusable, and intervention of the new only where there was a need for it. A family of fluorescent lighting details was developed to camouflage into the different ceiling and wall contexts. 7 rooms with 4 architectural typologies: top lit sheds with A-frame trusses, concrete flat roof with downstand beams, brick rooms, and a steel-framed dry-lined room. A material palette for new elements was kept deliberately colorless, using white, mirrored stainless steel, glass, and translucent multiwall polycarbonate, art-case plywood. An assembly of clear, solid, reflective, and translucent surfaces was ...