ARCHITECTURE: Annabelle Selldorf

Annabelle Selldorf  (5/7/1960- ) is a German-born architect and founding principal of Selldorf Architects, a New York City-based architecture practice. Selldorf has designed gallery and exhibition spaces for Hauser & Wirth, The Whitney, Gladstone Gallery, Michael Werner, David Zwirner, Acquavella Galleries and Frieze Art Fair’s Frieze Masters. Her firm routinely collaborates with the Gagosian Gallery on exhibition designs.

By Efi Micjalarou

Annabelle Selldorf,  was born and raised in Cologne, and grew up in the Bauhaus tradition. While growing up, she was inspired heavily by both her father, Herbert Selldorf, and his subtle architectural approach as well as modernist tradition. At the age of 12, Selldorf’s father purchased a house in Cologne, Germany, making tiny adjustments to the lighting, furniture, and wall color that formed the foundation for her own architectural approach. Selldorf also found inspiration in Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe’s designs, citing his 1930 Tugendhat House in Brno, Czech Republic as typifying a balance of daily living and design. She moved to New York City in the early 1980s. She received her Bachelor of Architecture degree from Pratt Institute in New York and worked briefly for architect Richard Gluckm] then earned a Master of Architecture degree from Syracuse University in Florence, Italy. Annabelle Selldorf founded architectural design practice Selldorf Architects in 1988.  Now a 65-person firm, Selldorf Architects has worked on public and private projects that range from museums and libraries to a recycling facility, and at scales encompassing large new construction, historic renovations, and exhibition design. Buildings with weighty heritage aside, some of her firm’s best-known works have included purpose-built art sites, several of them with her old friend and client, blue-chip gallerist David Zwirner: beginning in the early 1990s when she worked on his first gallery in New York’s SoHo. Zwirner’s 30,000-square-foot, five-storeyed gallery in Manhattan’s Chelsea is one of Selldorf’s most soaring works yet. Designed to the highest environmental standards, the exterior is clad in board-formed-concrete framed by teak panelling; the interiors a refined play of scale, materiality and light. But as Selldorf reminds “Architecture is not just what you see; it’s also what it does”. In 2010, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg honored Selldorf’s firm with a Public Design Commission Award for the design of the Sunset Park Material Recovery Facility a processing center for New York City’s curbside metal, glass, and plastic recyclables. The Sunset Park Material Recovery Facility is also a winning site of Built by Women New York City, a competition launched by the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation during the fall of 2014 to identify outstanding and diverse sites and spaces designed, engineered and built by women. Clients include cultural institutions and universities such as the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Neue Galerie New York, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, and Brown University. In addition, the firm has created numerous galleries for David Zwirner, and Gladstone Gallery among others, and designed exhibitions for Frieze Masters and the 2013 Venice Art Biennale. She’s designed homes for artists such as David Salle, Eric Fischl and Cindy Sherman and collectors like Stephen and Ann Ames, and a studio for Jeff Koons. She’s rolled out a range of projects both personal and professional for the powerful Swiss gallerists Manuela Hauser and Iwan Wirth, from art galleries in spaces as complicated as a Lutyens-designed bank in London and a former roller disco rink in New York to a family house in London’s Holland Park. She is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an Academician of the National Academy Museum and School, and a Board Member of the Architectural League of New York and the Chinati Foundation. In 2012 Selldorf was elected to become a member of the National Academy of Design.