MALI Contemporary Art Wing

Our proposal for the New MALI Contemporary Art Wing is a direct response to the insurmountable conundrum of the brief: the need to position a new building contiguous to the existing one, which would have almost zero presence above ground. Our response was a ‘grounded object’, a building with agency and autonomy as mass, but entirety submerged within the ground.

Serving as a kind of negative plinth, the project is predicated on resolving an urban condition and organizing the heavy pedestrian traffic of its busy intersection, rather than simply creating an object. The project combines the pragmatic efficiency of the linear bar shape with the crystalline character of its more idiosyncratic protrusions. In the balance between solid and void, object and field, building and excavation, it asserts itself as an engaged and mysterious grounded object—decidedly introspective and withdrawn while conspicuously iconic and texturally emblematic.