Galería AAF | S-AR

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Galería AAF | S-AR

Information

  • Project Name: Galería AAF
  • Practice: S-AR
  • Products: Cemex , Vitro , Maderería el Salto , Metall Und Logistik
  • Completion year: 2020
  • Gross Built up Area: 234 sqm
  • Project Location: Monterrey
  • Country: Mexico
  • Structural Consultants: CM Ingeniería
  • Collaborators: Carlos Morales, Marisol González
  • Photo Credits: Ana Cecilia Garza Villarreal
  • Others: Supervision S-AR + Gonzalo Tamez, Builder / General Contractor: Gonzalo Tamez + Enrique López
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Excerpt: Galería AAF is a contemporary art gallery designed by the architectural firm S-AR. This project aims to distribute the gallery spaces in a small three-story building. The first floor contains a public space for readings and lectures and a kitchen to help prepare exhibition openings. Taken together, this construction, layout, and finishing elements serve as artifacts added to the basic structure to provide the building with specific advantages in terms of thermal comfort, light, and appearance.

Project Description

[Text as submitted by Architect] This project aims to distribute the gallery spaces in a small three-story building. The first floor contains a public space for readings and lectures and a kitchen to help prepare exhibition openings. At the rear of this level, a room was created for artist residencies, containing its bathroom and a patio. This level employs a construction system based on unfinished cinder block walls and steel deck slabs on white-painted IPR beams. The enclosures are made specifically for this building from wood, aluminum, glass, and metal mesh.

Galería AAF | S-AR
© Ana Cecilia Garza Villarreal

The second level is the open-plan exhibition area intended to display a range of artworks and interventions. This level has walls finished in plaster, white paint, and a reticular reinforced concrete slab with coffered formwork left exposed.

Galería AAF | S-AR
© Ana Cecilia Garza Villarreal

On the third floor, a reading room also serves as an office and meeting room. This space is clad with strips of pine wood and an exposed, bare concrete ceiling slab. The gallery is crowned with an open-air patio that also serves as a lookout point when the metal doors enclosing it are opened.

Galería AAF | S-AR
© Ana Cecilia Garza Villarreal

All these spaces are positioned at the center of the plot, leaving the vertical circulation routes on the side of the adjacent property boundary. In contrast, the other side forms a lateral patio letting light into the ground floor. This contrasts with the dark ambiance of the circulation block, where the staircases form single flights: a concrete stair in the first section and a timber stair in the second.

Galería AAF | S-AR
© Ana Cecilia Garza Villarreal

The upper levels receive daylight from the short sides of the volume through folding doors that can be adjusted to provide more or less light and privacy and form the front and rear façades.

Galería AAF | S-AR
© Ana Cecilia Garza Villarreal

The south-facing lateral wall is clad with corrugated metal to provide a thermal barrier to solar gain. Combined with the polystyrene-filled blocks used in the walls, this helps to keep interiors fresh during the city’s warmest months.

Galería AAF | S-AR
© Ana Cecilia Garza Villarreal
Galería AAF | S-AR
© S-AR

Taken together, this construction, layout, and finishing elements serve as artifacts added to the basic structure to provide the building with specific advantages in terms of thermal comfort, light, and appearance.

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