The West Village warehouse reborn as an airy cultural space

The building at 225 West 13th Street looks like a typical small New York industrial structure. Simple arched windows, a creamy brick facade and a subtle cornice implied in modelled brick. Like so many of its type, it has survived since 1909 not because it is exceptional but because it has proved adaptable: perfect for a succession of uses.

Built as a factory and warehouse for the New York Consolidated Card Company, it then became a plumbing supplies store. It was a masonry workshop, home and studio to an artist (David Deutsch) and, more recently, a recording studio (used by bands such as LCD Soundsystem). Now it is home to Cara, the Centre for Art, Research and Alliances. The history of Greenwich Village, from manufacturing to culture, is inscribed in its use.

Reimagined as a cultural centre and non-profit arts space, it is a building that acknowledges that, just as its use has evolved within its functional frame, so the idea of art, its practitioners and its audiences, is shifting. It is a building not for a particular idea of art but one in which art might continue to become something else.

The scope and sometimes the strangeness are apparent from Cara’s description of itself as “a space for un-learning, kinship, and care, and [to] value the practice of being an organisation-in-formation in perpetuity”. 

Founded by Jane Hait, it might be read as a reaction to the commercial gallery world. Hait ran Wallspace in Chelsea, a well-regarded gallery with a fine roster of artists but, on the night of Hurricane Sandy a decade ago, a wall of water smashed into the building, leaving its basement archives a mess of floating papers and melting maquettes. The heartbreak of having to sort through sodden artefacts profoundly affected her and led, in a sense, to this new way of working.

She was also partly inspired by London’s Raven Row, an institution that supports deep research into less well-known artists, schools or historic moments. Hait alighted on Raven Row’s architects, London-based 6a (they were also responsible for the South London Gallery and are currently working on Tate Liverpool).

This is 6a’s first US building; their approach has been to design every space, every room, with art in mind. The deceptively deep building offers a wonderfully characteristic double aspect, from tree-lined street to yard, its back giving on to a scenography of windows, water towers, enigmatic blank flank walls, and greenery in surprising places. Windows give each space a glimpse of a once-quotidian rear view of Manhattan which is now, as development chews up old structures, becoming rarer.

The architecture is understated: block walls, concrete stairs and stripped-back accreted surfaces, finishes and floors which reveal an industrial past and reimagine a raw but accommodating future.

The whole depth is now visible from the street, a big room contained by concrete beams above, white-painted brick walls and glass globe lights hanging like cheery balloons. Galleries at the rear overlook a new pocket garden (designed by Dan Pearson) and the lofty double-height space with its four windows to the street has real impact, a superb gallery space as much suited to performance and events as to painting or sculpture.

There are moments of subtle encounter where the basic, often invisible elements of construction and regulation become suddenly visible. Blocks of granite on the stairs become bullnosed seats or a place to lean; a small fire extinguisher sits in a gently curving, galvanised steel niche. A hydraulic lid for the lift shaft becomes a bar area; the glazing bars of a rear window become an artist’s grid imposed on an almost perfect New York backdrop of brick and black-painted steel. The roof becomes a playful landscape of corrugated steel, mechanicals and chimney stacks deformed over the years into endearingly shonky sculptures.

There are echoes here of early Frank Gehry, the language of LA squeezed on to a Manhattan rooftop, and of 6a’s own recent rebuilding of Milton Keynes’ MK Gallery, a tableau capturing layers of modernisms.

The gallery’s executive director, Manuela Moscoso (curator of the Liverpool Biennial in 2021), says: “We want to have romances with many people, to be polyamorous.” And they want to spread the love beyond the small gallery’s walls. Its opening took the form of a series of festivals, drawing in community groups, storytellers and the under-represented, flattening out the notion of representation; the current show, by South African artist and composer Neo Muyanga, A Mass of Cyborgs, focuses on pan-African protest songs.

In a neighbourhood renowned for activism and political engagement, Cara, with its ethos of accessibility and free engagement, seems to have found receptive ground.

cara-nyc.org