Childhood should be a wonderful journey, and the Children's Museum of the East End helps make the trip even better with a discovery-themed approach to the familiar and the unknown, the real and the imagined, and environments both natural and urban. Lee H. Skolnick Architecture + Design Partnership provided complete architecture and exhibit design services for the Long Island museum.
Melbourne's City Museum calls itself "The Gateway to Marvelous Melbourne," and is considered an excellent orientation to visiting the city. It is located in the historic Old Treasury building, at a primary city intersection. Its main entry, however, is through a nondescript door found only after climbing a grand stair and crossing a windswept podium.
emerystudio's job was to signal the presence of the museum in a dramatic way and encourage visitors to make the trek to see its permanent and temporary exhibits.
With miles of concrete and cinder block as their palette, the emerystudio design team decided to have some fun with graphics for the Eureka Tower parking garage in Melbourne.
Inspired by the work of Swiss artist Felice Varini—whose perspective-defying installations look a lot like giant vector art superimposed on buildings or interior architectural spaces—the team designed colorful forms that are both two- and three-dimensional.
Manhattan's Hearst Tower, the first LEED office tower in New York, is a modern reinterpretation of the Hearst Corporation's original six-story, cast stone, Art Deco home. Foster + Partners inserted a 44-story steel-and-glass tower inside the original structure. The landmark façade is now a 70-ft.-high, skylit atrium space.
The first American interior designer to become a household name, Dorothy Draper was the mid-20th century's Martha Stewart. For a retrospective of her work at the Museum of the City of New York, Pure+Applied used dramatic overscaling and fresh interpretations of Draper's signature decorating techniques to illustrate her bold, brash, and sometimes grandiose style.
Designing exhibits for a museum whose purpose is to celebrate a language is a bit different from creating a shrine for artifacts. At the Museum of the Portuguese Language, the world's first museum of its kind, Ralph Appelbaum Associates presents the language as a dynamic cultural heritage and uses technology to emphasize its permanent state of transformation.
emerystudio was tasked with designing temporary street decorations for the City of Melbourne's 2006/2007 holiday season. City officials dedicated a wall in a central city location for the installation of a nativity scene.
emerystudio steered the design solution away from the traditional crèche approach and instead designed a type-based solution founded on the "nativity text" from the Bible.
Designed as an exhibition space to market one of New Jersey's tallest buildings, the Newport Tower Marketing Center's purpose was to help potential tenants visualize what they could achieve within the space.
Architect Bates Smart and client PMP Limited, a media production and magazine distribution company, requested a three-dimensional, textural, dramatically uplit installation to add pizzazz to a two-story reception area wall in the firm's Melbourne headquarters.
emerystudio responded with an abstract piece that refers to streams of digital information and the notion of a performance indicator, "a visual representation of the transition from chaos to order." Small fragments of the 23- by 26-ft. piece—made from humble MDF—are placed throughout the office.
Sarah Lawrence College Heimbold Visual Arts Center. Visual arts programs at Sarah Lawrence College had long outgrown their original home and spilled into additional makeshift spaces around campus.
