Building 86

1: Exhibition view. See listing below for full details of image.
COURTESY: R & Company / PHOTOGRAPH: Logan Jackson

For years, the art and design world has been fighting the antiseptic neutrality of the standard white cube exhibition space. In its place have come idiosyncratic lived-in domestic environments, repurposed factories and meticulously restored chateaux. More recently, there’s also been a push to present wares within the rough-and-ready storehouses where highly prized works are ordinarily placed for safekeeping. In 2016, Swiss furniture giant Vitra opened its Schaudepot and last year, London’s Victoria & Albert Museum unveiled its V&A East Storehouse. While both venues have ‘pulled back the curtains’ and in doing so, highlighted the directness and efficiency of these ubiquitous industrial facilities, they’ve done so with an arguably manufactured approach, because although exhibited on an exposed steel rack system and within half-open shipping crates, everything is still pristine and perfectly centred in place, to ensure optimal Instagram engagement. 

2: Exhibition view. See listing below for full details of image.
COURTESY: R & Company / PHOTOGRAPH: Logan Jackson

By repositioning its expansive Brooklyn Navy Yard warehouse as more forthright, unpolished ‘visible storage,’ R & Company is doing things differently. For the gallery, a long-established, Design Miami founding-member participant, this space has been a hive of activity for a decade. It’s here that Katie Stout’s baroque sculptures are deftly turned into functional chandeliers; where Ashley Hicks’ painted cloth cabinets are photographed. Amid these dedicated workshops and photographic studios where expert teams of technicians and restorers are busy as bees, there are rows and rows of double height, heavy-duty wooden skid shelves, filled with unexpected treasures. Included are multiples of rare Brazilian modernist chairs by José Zanine Caldas, Joaquim Tenreiro and Lina Bo Bardi. Only about half of the 16,000 square-foot space has been unpacked, and for seasoned dealers and gallery principals Evan Snyderman and Zesty Meyers, the process is a walk down memory lane. “We’ve uncovered things that we hadn’t seen in decades,” Snyderman reflects. “Unless someone asks about it, it just sort of disappears.” 

3: Exhibition view. See listing below for full details of image.
COURTESY: R & Company / PHOTOGRAPH: Logan Jackson

That’s the point with the latest venture. It comes just as R & Company sold off its massive, second Tribeca space earlier this year and has strategically scaled back to its original storefront nearby. The aim is to refocus and recognise that the majority of sales are initiated at major fairs. The ‘Building 86’ project will now serve as an important counterpoint: not just a space for Snyderman and Meyers to test out different exhibition concepts and create unlikely yet effective pairings, but also to present a full breadth of the commercial inventory and private holdings they’ve amassed over the past three decades – R & Company is celebrating its 30th anniversary next year. While highly curated shows will still be mounted in the main Lower Manhattan space, a more impromptu programme of stagings will be carried out at ‘Building 86’.  

4: Exhibition view. See listing below for full details of image.
COURTESY: R & Company / PHOTOGRAPH: Logan Jackson

“The idea for us is to play around with what we already have,” says Meyers. “It’s about finding these moments and allowing things to just fall into place. You know, it’s always amazing how that happens. It’s a giant game of Tetris.” ‘Building 86’ also contains a vast array of archival materials – drawings, working models and unconventional invitations for the gallery’s exhaustive list of seminal exhibitions – even an asparagus can.

5: Exhibition view. See listing below for full details of image.
COURTESY: R & Company / PHOTOGRAPH: Logan Jackson

Flat files hold various exhibition posters including one for an October 2001 Verner Panton retrospective, the largest of its kind in the U.S. up to that point. “It was just a couple of weeks after 9/11,” Snyderman recalls. “We opened a show in Tribeca, (just a few blocks north of the World Trade Centre) which was insane. The whole neighbourhood was still cordoned off by tanks and it was one of the best shows we ever put on. It was a moment of relief from chaos.” Positioned elsewhere next to large Radical Italian Design egg nests – Gianni Ruffi’s 1972 ‘La Cova’ – are Panton’s incredibly scarce, equally radical ‘Pantonaef’ modular Lego-like toy designs.

6: Exhibition view. See listing below for full details of image.
COURTESY: R & Company / PHOTOGRAPH: Logan Jackson

Currently, the entrance is anchored by a cheeky Roberto Lugo marquee. A sinuously carved wooden shelf holds an eclectic selection of limited-edition models: miniatures of Serban Ionescu’s coloured sheet metal assemblages and Wendy Maruyama’s proto-Postmodern ‘Mickey Mackintosh’ chair. One of the full-scale re-editions of this, which Snyderman and Meyers helped produce, takes pride of place among the stacks as does Fernando and Humberto Campana’s 1993 ‘Escultura Screen’, created by rudimentarily wrapping together upcycled TV antennas. Many of these curiosities haven’t seen the light of day or been exhibited within the gallery for years. “We might not show these pieces like that in the gallery,” Meyers says when pointing out various pieces from the Haas Brothers ‘Hex’ series, carefully clustered together. 

7: Exhibition view. See listing below for full details of image.
COURTESY: R & Company / PHOTOGRAPH: Logan Jackson

The ‘Building 86’ space is set to become a straightforward, no-nonsense resource for museum curators and interior designers, but also for scholars. R & Company holds important archives relating to numerous legends including Greta Grossman and Wendell Castle. In this sense, architects and designers can cut through the fluff to quickly find what resources they need, and there’s also plenty of opportunity to come across something unexpected. Soon also to house the gallery’s sizable library, the space is set to reprise its role as a scholarly reference point. “Our foundational philosophy of the space is rooted in active engagement rather than passive observation,” Snyderman explains. “By exposing the restoration, cataloguing and research processes, we aren’t just showing finished objects, we’re revealing the entire lifecycle and labour behind design history.”

8: Exhibition view. See listing below for full details of image.
COURTESY: R & Company / PHOTOGRAPH: Logan Jackson

When the duo founded the gallery in 1997 as ‘R 20th Century’, they worked out of a raw, unheated warehouse in Williamsburg. It was the foundation of their irreverent approach; appreciation for material experimentation and support for talent that blurred the boundaries of what constitutes art and design, sculpture and furniture. Returning to a similar type of space and turning it into a secondary exhibition platform is a full-circle moment; a reaffirmation of their dedication to irreverence at a time when collectible design is increasingly safe, decorative, and neutrally uniform.