This award winning project is located in West downtown Boise. The site was a brown-field car lot and repair shed in a light industrial and warehouse services neighborhood. In 2006, American Institute of Architecture judges praised the project’s use of geometry and the building’s marriage to its site and awarded the project the only Award of Honor for the Idaho Chapter that year.
The building conforms to the triangular site creating a lush interior courtyard that transitions visitors into the gallery space as well as providing the work spaces with continuous garden views. The building’s solidity, with its 10 foot courtyard walls and steel panel doors, is a simultaneous overture to its surroundings and a strong threshold to another realm.
Interior spaces also reference the site’s geometry. 18 foot interior walls are folded in geometric iterations. The oriented strand-board of the structural roof deck is reflected in the floor below. Custom birch plywood furnishings, cabinets and shelving, like the building itself, are slotted with apertures at their seams
Utilizing several natural light strategies on the interior – a cloud ceiling reflecting the light from 3 skylights above the main exhibit space, light shelves providing reflected natural light to both the work and exhibit wings and corner windows providing ambient light and views without compromising wall space – the project also carefully frames views of the Boise foothills frontage and downtown.
For more information please visit www.jcrist.com
