Art Gallery & Residences

The Delfina Foundation is both an arts organisation and a temporary home for international artists: a place where people from different cultures live, meet and exchange, and then leave with their practice changed. The foundation planned to restructure its residencies into synchronised thematic cycles. Removing the overlap between residencies would also remove an informal exchange between successive groups, so we asked whether the building itself could do the remembering: keeping the culture, and handing it on.

The proposal gives the building a place for memory and exchange. A thick new wall encloses the stair and connects the five floors: a party wall, shared between the two houses, and host to the social life of the foundation. On one side, over the ground and first floors, sits the formal foundation archive. Set into its other face, and dispersed upward through the house, are bead-blasted bronze niches: an informal archive where residents leave what struck them and take what interests them. The untreated bronze would record use, with frequently handled niches developing a darker patina.

The houses are Grade II listed, and their floors span from front to rear, so the central cross walls are complicated to alter. The design limits demolition, cuts selective openings for views and light, so that the lower floors gain flowing circulation while the rooms keep their domestic character.

Visitors enter at No. 29 into a reception lined in wool felt, opening to the galleries and courtyard. Staff and residents enter at No. 30 and climb past the niches, up an open-tread elm wood stair with reading benches on its returns, past further niches for post and personal traces, and past windows cut through to the studios themselves.

Nex collaborated with artist Nadia Kaabi-Linke, selected after research across contemporary MENA artists and twice a Delfina resident herself. Her proposed installation, Mute, would transmit sounds from the house as vibrations through the stair handrails.