Years ago I spent a few days prowling the Chicago Art Fair and, more specifically, its extracurricular events. There was, it seemed, an unspoken rule that if there were going to be an after hours party, it wouldn't take place in a hotel room or a house or an apartment complex on the lake-it had to be in the lone surviving building amid a wasteland of vacant lots and piles of rubble.
I don't know if party hosts were seeking out such locations to ensure that no neighbors were bothered or if the underground party scene's planning council had voted in favor of a post-apocalyptic chic theme that year. All I know is that music and lights would throb from a central beacon while we, the guests, would arrive from all directions and clamber zombie-like over dirt piles and around the burnt husks of abandoned cars, beginning to twitch our undead arms in rhythmic spasms as we lumbered closer and closer to the sound system and the beer keg.
A similar sense overtook me on Saturday night as I shuffled across the train tracks, through an empty lot and past a construction dumpster on my way into a christening soiree for Victoria Price Contemporary Art & Design, the Price-Dewey Gallery owner's new venue in the old Sears building at Paseo and Guadalupe. The red stucco building
with turnbuckled steel awnings and inset glass entryways currently sits alone on the corner across from SITE Santa Fe, awaiting the July 6 grand opening of impending tenants Evo Gallery and James Kelly Contemporary, who will occupy the building alongside Tai Gallery and Price.
The building's sense of being alone in a vast open space, due to the barren future construction sites bordering it, has recently been magnified by the demolition of the old Wellborn paint store on the northeast lot of the same intersection. (As an aside, Wellborn was a quirky and wonderful building with a great location and lots of potential-it's a sure sign that alien crack fiends are running things when a building like that is torn down to make room for a new bank thoughtfully located next door to…a bank.)
Approaching the building at night, the only source of light aside from Price Contemporary came from the Allsup's up the street, so it wasn't hard to return to the vibe of those ruined Chicago neighborhoods and the idea of salvation just beyond the next heap of debris. Because there was no art on the walls, only flashing party lights and a DJ working below the high timber ceiling, the sense inside was eerily reminiscent as well, except that instead of thick-necked mid-westerners with pit bulls on chains, there were slender cowboy-booted women and projected photos of terriers. Instead of a beer keg, there was a hunky bar "manny" serving up margaritas and sangria. Instead of a performance artist punching herself in the mouth in what may have been art or may have been a drunken accident, there was the architect, Devendra Narayan Contractor, who gave every indication of relative satisfaction with a job well done. He was kind enough to ask what I thought about the building and the Price gallery interior, which his firm had worked on as well, but before I could respond we were separated by the party tides that wash people from one side of the room to the next and swirl them up into small eddies around the bar, the food, the bathroom.
It was a lucky turn of events because the scope of my insight didn't extend very far beyond my margarita at the time. Eavesdropping on others revealed two disparate camps: those with general goodwill toward the space ("It's cool!") and those with a more critical (and thoughtful) bent.
The criticism suggested that, because the space has a large glass entryway that fronts Guadalupe Street and also a large glass entryway directly opposite that fronts, well, the dust and detritus of the Railyard, it felt like a hallway, a giant tube which would suck the energy of anything with a soul straight out one side or the other, feng-shui intervention or no. The less thoughtful criticism held that the building was a bright monstrosity hogging prime real estate that might be used instead for, well, nobody could say, but I suspect they were dreaming of more banks.
As eager as I am to harp on the consistent failure of anyone anywhere to do anything meaningful and good-ever-I have to disagree with the critics and praise Contractor's remodel as a successful one. It is, in my mind, a hugely important building for Santa Fe, a cornerstone of the Railyard development and an official coronation of the existing, and now recognized, non-Canyon Road arts district. The party in Price's spare, Chelsea-like space was the first tangible sense of developing life on the Railyard pursuant to the master plan that we've all been carrying around in our ass pockets for years and years and, in that sense, it was a triumphant and beautiful moment.
Here's why the building works: First, most of us-even arts writers-are going to spend more time outside the building than in. Being able to see through the building, because of the copious glazing on two sides, prevents it from being a chunky barrier and instead makes it a shifting presence, both solid and inviting-a framed point of entry for what lies beyond. Checking with Deirdre Harris, a project manager for the remodel, confirmed that this is a key element of the design.
"There is an intention of permeability, to allow clear passageway to the Railyard beyond it," she says. Harris went on to explain that it was critical for the retail gallery spaces to maintain Guadalupe Street frontage, but equally important to face the future Railyard development, namely the Farmer's Market building. Harris also confirmed that the building won't be fully realized until nearby projects are complete, saying, "It'll become part of a neighborhood instead of just being a corner peg."
The cocktail party critics are right in the sense that energy is sucked through the spaces, but if that's what it takes for one building to initiate an organic and flowing relationship with the future, it's more blessing than curse, a goodwill gesture that, if followed in turn by each new building on the Railyard, can renew some of the sense of neighborhood that much of Santa Fe has lost.
