A fourth-floor office in Prospect Heights, repurposed as a gallery this April. Cubicle walls still standing. Art hung on HVAC systems, tucked into utility closets, slotted into a metal recycling bin. The curator, Florian Meisenberg, called the leftover whiteboard scrawls from a previous tenant “cave paintings.” He told Hyperallergic: “I didn’t change anything, I love it.”
I believe him. That’s the problem.
In October 2023, I spent three days mapping how the building guides people through space in a converted warehouse in Rotterdam that had been turned into a “cultural hub.” The building kept its freight elevator, its poured-concrete loading dock, its original signage — a forklift icon, a weight limit in kilograms. The designers called this “leaving original materials and surfaces visible rather than covering them up.” They meant: they didn’t renovate. The freight elevator had no textured surfaces that blind visitors can feel to navigate safely. The loading dock had a six-inch lip with no contrast strip. The original signage, which told forklift operators where to go, now told visitors nothing. Visitors are not forklifts. But the signage looked industrial. It looked raw. So it stayed.
I mapped every decision point in that building where a person had to choose which direction to move. Fourteen. Eleven of them relied on tiny, hard-to-read text on grey walls. Two relied on following other people. One relied on sound — a buzzer.
Nobody asked me to do this. I did it because I walked in and saw the room before I saw the art. The room was the argument, and the argument was: this space was not designed for you to find your way through it. It was designed for you to feel something about its surfaces.
In May 2022, I visited De Appel, a contemporary art institution in Amsterdam, after they moved into a former garage on the Scheldeplein. Different city, different building, same bones — industrial origin, cultural afterlife. But De Appel stripped their floors. They installed clear sightlines. They put navigation in the architecture itself: colour on the floor, open thresholds you could read from twenty metres. They spent money where it doesn’t photograph well. You could move through that building without asking anyone where to go. Nobody wrote a breathless headline about it.
The Rotterdam warehouse got coverage in three design magazines. De Appel’s renovation got none.
Meisenberg’s show at 1000 Dean Street, the Prospect Heights gallery mentioned earlier, exists because one out of five commercial spaces in that borough sat empty at the end of last year. A landlord had a conversation with a tenant. A guitar-string manufacturer’s office became available. Forty-plus artists installed work throughout the space. The cubicle walls, the closets, the ductwork — all kept. “It feels like we stumbled upon this place and found signs of life,” Meisenberg said.
I read that sentence four times. Stumbled upon. Found. As if the building were discovered rather than chosen. As if keeping the cubicle partitions were archaeology rather than cost savings.
Here is what I see when I look at photographs of that space. Narrow corridors between partition walls. No visible egress markings. Art mounted at varying heights on surfaces never rated for public gallery traffic. Lighting designed for someone sitting at a desk, not standing in front of a painting. I see a building whose spatial grammar was written for eight-hour seated office workers, now hosting standing visitors who need to circulate, orient, and exit. The grammar didn’t change. The population did.
This happens constantly. A building fails commercially, and someone with taste and friends sees potential. The failure becomes the aesthetic. The exposed pipe is not a pipe — it is a gesture. The too-narrow corridor is not a code violation — it is intimacy. The absence of clear wayfinding is not neglect — it is a curatorial choice. You are meant to stumble upon things.
I don’t stumble. I read rooms. Every Deaf person I know reads rooms. You walk in and you clock the sight lines, the exits, the reflective surfaces, the places where someone could approach from behind you without being seen. You do this before you take your coat off. It is not anxiety. It is literacy. And when I read a room that has been made deliberately illegible, I understand exactly what I’m looking at. I’m looking at a space designed by people who can afford to be lost.
Lebbeus Woods — the architect who never built, who drew structures emerging from war damage — said in a 2009 lecture at the Cooper Union that “the ruin is not a starting point but an ending point being misread as a beginning.” He was talking about Sarajevo. The scale is different. The mechanism is the same. You take a structure that failed the people who used it, and you reframe that failure as raw material. The guitar-string workers left. The cubicles remain. The cubicles become art.
An architect I worked with in Ghent in March 2024 told me, over coffee, something I think about weekly. “Every ‘raw space’ exhibition I’ve permitted, I’ve known the egress was wrong. I sign off because the fire marshal signs off. The fire marshal signs off because it’s temporary. Temporary is the loophole that eats buildings.”
Meisenberg’s whiteboards still carry motivational slogans from the previous tenants. He preserved them. He finds them dystopic. I find them precise: they are instructions for navigating a space that was built for one purpose and is now being used for another, and nobody updated the instructions.
The signs still say what they always said. Nobody changed the room they point to.