Sperone Westwater Gallery, founded in 1975 in SoHo, is a contemporary art gallery located at 257 Bowery, New York, NY, between Houston and Stanton Streets. Contained within a bright red box, the gallery rises gradually to connect the upper four floors and is visible through the translucent, milled glass facade, its gentle pace contrasting with the activity of the city and traffic outside. In a flexible spatial arrangement, the exhibition space can be extended at any given floor by parking the red moving room, whereupon an additional lift and stairs provide alternative routes up through the building. The room’s exposed concrete shaft and mechanics draw on an aesthetic and scale appropriate to the building’s context which, albeit in transition, remains largely industrial, while the volume in which the room rises provides a thermal and acoustic buffer zone for the galleries. The whole visual identity is focused on the "red box".
