The Art Cave is located on a 17-acre site in northern Napa Valley, California and was designed by Bade Stageberg Cox. The property includes an active vineyard, an original farmhouse built in 1887, and a dispersed collection of large outdoor artworks and landscape pieces.

The clients have an extensive collection of contemporary art that is displayed in their home to the extent that is feasible. However, many works are large in scale, technologically complex, or are best experienced in an environment more appropriate than the existing traditional farmhouse interior.

The principal aim of the project was to add 4,500 sf of exhibition space, with 1,500 sf additional for support functions, to house the collection and support its growth in a controlled environment. The new space allows for installations that explore the full breadth of the collection, from works that are very small to those that are extremely large, from sculpture and painting to new media and installation art.

Taking advantage of economical cave-drilling technologies developed for the local wine industry, the Art Cave is conceived as a large-scale, passively conditioned, subterranean space. The site is beneath a north-facing slope formerly terraced for prune orchards. The spaces of the Art Cave are designed to respond to and complement the domestically-scaled display spaces of the farmhouse. The inherently curvaceous geometry of the cave is exploited to create a space lacking the familiar architectural cues of corner, edge and detail. This zone of the middle scale is occupied by art. Inside the seemingly boundless space of the cave, the encounter with art occurs in a context unencumbered by traditional functions or associations.

In response to the domestically scaled spaces of the existing farmhouse, the exhibition spaces of the Art Cave are conceived of as the house’s complement. In contrast to the farmhouse, a symbol of the domestication of the landscape, the Art Cave is subtly integrated into the environment. The cave’s presence is only hinted at by the articulated weathering-steel incisions in the terraced hillside which mark the entrance portals. The cave’s condition as architecture is ambiguous; its scale not apparent and its extent indeterminate. Set in relation to important alignments on the site, and connected by pathways to other outdoor works such as Cady Noland’s “Log Cabin Blank With Screw Eyes and Café Door (Memorial to John Caldwell)” (1990), and James Turrell’s “Skyspace” (2007), the discovery and experience of the Art Cave is one of transition between sunlight and the subterranean, between landscape and architecture, between the known and the unknown.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 12th, 2009 at 4:46 am and is filed under Architecture Design. Tags: Art Cave, Art Cave Design, articulated weathering-steel incisions, Bade Stageberg Cox Architecture, Beatiful Architecture design, Cady Noland, Café Door, California, California United States, contemporary art, economical cave-drilling technologies, incisions, James Turrell, John Caldwell, Log Cabin Blank, Napa Valley, Napa Valley architecture, Napa Valley Building design, Skyspace. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.