JUSTIN BANDA

While this gallery originated as a simple architectural tribute to a prominent artist from Chicago, the themes that kept recurring in and around Kanye’s life and work, like racial profiling, police brutality, and the black experience as it relates to the city of Chicago, all burst to the forefront of the project. This led to the 9th and 10th levels being reimagined from museum and gallery spaces into youth outreach and educational spaces, specifically for the Donda Foundation’s use.

The Dr. Donda West Foundation is a Chicago-based nonprofit whose mission is to support young aspiring artists in Chicago, by honoring the educational legacy of Dr. West by implementing arts and literature experiences that transform the lives of inner-city youth. The instruction is not only in arts; after the programs, students who had previously dropped out are ready to re-enroll in school, and are given a blueprint for personal and professional growth beyond school. Giving the foundation a new base of operations inside the West Gallery seemed like a logical next step towards incorporating outreach and inclusive spaces with the architectural mandate.

The resulting architectural composition is my attempt at creating layers of information filtered through chaos. By drawing from the inhumanity and violence of the neighborhood’s history as well as the dissonant music of Kanye himself, I attempted to form a sterile framing device— in this case, the resulting obelisk— to process this new landmark and point of reference. From a design standpoint, the building attempts to process multiple nodes and touchstones to form a machine understanding, wrapped around a core of vulnerability.

Kathleen M. Kirby writes in Indifferent Boundaries that “Space, and where we are in it, determines a large portion of our status as subjects, and obversely, the kinds of subjects we are largely dictates our degree of mobility and our possible future locations.” This gallery is an attempt to deconstruct the experience of black artists in Chicago, and create an equitable space that propels it’s inhabitants forward in their art towards calmer futures.

At the edge of Gowanus we developed the transit station at 9th/Smith to support the nearby transit-oriented development just north, while also developing the transit station itself as a high-end commercial center to draw business from Manhattan. The east edge of this area continues the reconstruction of the IBZ by seeding tower residential with high-density industrial, and the southern tip functions as a new campus for the Brooklyn-based Metro Tech university.

Noted on the graphic to the right is the project area, which includes the extents of Gowanus and a small portion of Red Hook in the southwest. Note that the existing lots bordering the Canal were rezoned in the 1940s and 50s to break the residential fabric to make way for indsutry. After the industry’s exodus, the contaminated canal was left behind, creating vast swaths of non- or under-utilized lots.

We introduced an arts-focused district near the crux, aiming to support the creative nature of the neighborhood while revitalizing a beloved, currently-abandoned power station, lovingly nicknamed “The Batcave” by residents. This area is marked by enclosed public plazas and high-density residential and retail along the waterfront. The 1st St basin is carved out to rectify canal overflow and flooding.

From an architectural standpoint, the other major draw is the site of Fulton Market itself, which has a violent and controversial background. In the composition, I attempted to capture the feeling of sensory overload from the site, by blocking out the city as a whole, then focusing and zooming in on multiple, autonomous points, layers of information filtered through chaos. In much the same way, Kanye’s music is about overload— verbally, lyrically, politically, economically, religiously— so it would seem apropos that his gallery would function the same way. Fulton Market has a recorded history of sensory overload as a meatpacking “hell” or “jungle,” as Upton Sinclair described it in his book “The Jungle,” written about the awful conditions that the site used to have at the turn of the twentieth century.

A large portion of Gowanus exists within the IBZ, the Industrial Business Zone. Set up in 2006 in 16 NYC neighborhoods, the IBZ was established to protect manufacturing and industrial jobs citywide. Gowanus is surrounded by six other neighborhoods: Park Slope, Boerum Hill, Carroll Gardens, Red Hook, and Greenwood/South Slope.