The Carlow Art Center is a 3,000 sq meter building dedicated to presenting contemporary world art. In addition to large flexible gallery spaces, the program for this competition also called for educational spaces, offices, and a cafe connected to an adjacent public plaza. Since the program of the Center virtually fills out the site, the adjacent open spaces must, including the proposed surface car park, flow into the building in order to make it accessible and more infrastructural. To enable this, a portion of the site has been lowered to –1.80 m. Not only does this produce a more continuous landscape, this sectional configuration allows the building to be reduced in apparent height. While the building at the lower levels is transparent and dynamic, the mass of the building above is organized into four opaque bands that respond to the program inside and to the site context outside.
