Chinatown Community Arts Space
Chinatown, New York
Reflecting on collectivity and coming to the table while brainstorming the adaptive reuse of a cellar for a community arts space.
Ideation for this project weaves together past and current lives of a multi-generational family-owned building, touching on ideas about stewardship, collective memory, and belonging for future generations.
+ Talitha Liu, Lexi Tsien
+ Visualization with Daniel Chang
Chinatown, New York
Reflecting on collectivity and coming to the table while brainstorming the adaptive reuse of a cellar for a community arts space.
Ideation for this project weaves together past and current lives of a multi-generational family-owned building, touching on ideas about stewardship, collective memory, and belonging for future generations.
+ Talitha Liu, Lexi Tsien
+ Visualization with Daniel Chang
Ruth Arts Foundation
Milwuakee, WI
The Ruth Arts space is the adaptive reuse of a former warehouse located in Milwaukee’s historic Walker’s Point district. As the foundation’s first public physical space, the multipurpose building functions as an art gallery, a community kitchen, and an artist studio. Soft-Firm collaborated closely with the Ruth Arts Foundation to articulate how the interior fit-out could support the organization’s vision for a home that cultivates artists, their collaborators, and the community.
The material palette utilizes stainless steel and plywood saturated with colors from the Ruth Arts’ graphic identity. Materials are a pragmatic nod to the spaces’ industrial history, and provide a tactile pop of color against the space’s existing whitewashed brick, concrete, and exposed timber palette.
We imagined the user experience as travelling through a gradient of zones: Welcome, Gallery, Community, and Studio. Within this gradient, we focused on strategic interventions that support a range of public programs at multiple scales of gathering, from viewing art, receptions, artist talks, art creation, community workshops, performance, to simply co-working for Ruth Arts employees.
+ Renovation designed by MOS
+ Lexi Tsien, Talitha Liu
+ Table & kitchen fabrication by Zak Rose / Dock 6 Collective
+ Photography by Landre
Milwuakee, WI
The Ruth Arts space is the adaptive reuse of a former warehouse located in Milwaukee’s historic Walker’s Point district. As the foundation’s first public physical space, the multipurpose building functions as an art gallery, a community kitchen, and an artist studio. Soft-Firm collaborated closely with the Ruth Arts Foundation to articulate how the interior fit-out could support the organization’s vision for a home that cultivates artists, their collaborators, and the community.
The material palette utilizes stainless steel and plywood saturated with colors from the Ruth Arts’ graphic identity. Materials are a pragmatic nod to the spaces’ industrial history, and provide a tactile pop of color against the space’s existing whitewashed brick, concrete, and exposed timber palette.
We imagined the user experience as travelling through a gradient of zones: Welcome, Gallery, Community, and Studio. Within this gradient, we focused on strategic interventions that support a range of public programs at multiple scales of gathering, from viewing art, receptions, artist talks, art creation, community workshops, performance, to simply co-working for Ruth Arts employees.
+ Renovation designed by MOS
+ Lexi Tsien, Talitha Liu
+ Table & kitchen fabrication by Zak Rose / Dock 6 Collective
+ Photography by Landre
1. Cubby
At the Cubby, nested benches and stools are deployed through the space as clusters for intimate conversations, or arrayed as audience seating for performance.
2. Boob Table
At the bar, a community kitchen with two convertible tables can be rearranged from a kitchen counter to a conference table, to a bar for staging events.
3. Tool Shed + Workbench
In the Studio, a tool shed functions as a working shop, and can be screened off with movable partitions that double as pin-up surfaces on one side and vertical storage on the other.
A generous work counter floats above workbenches, tool carts, and flat files on casters, easily rearranged into an expandable multimedia workshop for artists and the community.
Scatter / Depth Kit
Brooklyn, NY
Soft-Firm designed the office of a virtual reality company as a three-part sequence along the VR production line. The long, skinny, semi-underground converted warehouse space is organized into three distinct zones:
Part I: Capture
Part II: Produce
Part III: Present
A pedestrian’s glimpse into the office from street level is a compressed journey from “real” to “virtual,” as they experience the VR lifecycle as a series of collapsed frames.
+ Published in Azure Magazine
“The Office As We Know It No Longer Exists”
+ Lexi Tsien, Talitha Liu, Henry Ng
Brooklyn, NY
Soft-Firm designed the office of a virtual reality company as a three-part sequence along the VR production line. The long, skinny, semi-underground converted warehouse space is organized into three distinct zones:
Part I: Capture
The engineering and scanning studio where physical objects are documented and digitized.
Part II: Produce
Individual workstations and a collaborative pin-up space where images are stitched together in immersive narrative arcs.
Part III: Present
A lounge and demonstration space where visitors cross “the Veil.” A rubber floor mat grounds the body while in VR, a haptic counterpoint to the boundless space of virtual reality.
A pedestrian’s glimpse into the office from street level is a compressed journey from “real” to “virtual,” as they experience the VR lifecycle as a series of collapsed frames.
+ Published in Azure Magazine
“The Office As We Know It No Longer Exists”
+ Lexi Tsien, Talitha Liu, Henry Ng
Knotel Prototypes
A phonebooth prototype for a global co-working startup that provides a flexible, “kit-of-parts” approach to office space, providing instant office environments in any floor plate.
A flat packed plywood shell lined with a customizable acoustic fabric interior lining, the prototype is emphatically thin like a line drawing. It takes on the efficient spatial logic of the grid, but is elongated to provide more expansive space for the body on the interior.
This is the most minimal intervention for a start up that transforms any space into office space. Where digital technology renders office infrastructure obsolete in favor of devices, platforms, apps, and clouds, the dogmatic grid of the Modernist open office has morphed into a point cloud of infinite nodes.
+ Published in Azure Magazine
“The Office As We Know It No Longer Exists”
+ Lexi Tsien, Talitha Liu, Henry Ng
A phonebooth prototype for a global co-working startup that provides a flexible, “kit-of-parts” approach to office space, providing instant office environments in any floor plate.
A flat packed plywood shell lined with a customizable acoustic fabric interior lining, the prototype is emphatically thin like a line drawing. It takes on the efficient spatial logic of the grid, but is elongated to provide more expansive space for the body on the interior.
This is the most minimal intervention for a start up that transforms any space into office space. Where digital technology renders office infrastructure obsolete in favor of devices, platforms, apps, and clouds, the dogmatic grid of the Modernist open office has morphed into a point cloud of infinite nodes.
+ Published in Azure Magazine
“The Office As We Know It No Longer Exists”
+ Lexi Tsien, Talitha Liu, Henry Ng
Dance Studio
Brooklyn, New York
A renovation for bodycraft, a dance and fitness studio in Brooklyn. Lightweight screens separate the reception, group studio, and private studio. Polycarbonate twinwall sheets bring light through the space, but provide visual privacy from Atlantic Avenue. Partitions open 180° to create an open view corridor from the streetfront to the garden.
+Talitha Liu, Lexi Tsien
General Contractor: Darby Construction Services
Brooklyn, New York
A renovation for bodycraft, a dance and fitness studio in Brooklyn. Lightweight screens separate the reception, group studio, and private studio. Polycarbonate twinwall sheets bring light through the space, but provide visual privacy from Atlantic Avenue. Partitions open 180° to create an open view corridor from the streetfront to the garden.
+Talitha Liu, Lexi Tsien
General Contractor: Darby Construction Services
