The appropriately named Nomadic Museum is a 4,200 m2 ‘travelling’ gallery built to house Ashes and Snow, an exhibition of 200 large-scale artworks by the photographer Gregory Colbert. Originally located on New York’s historic Pier 54, where the Titanic was due to dock, the Nomadic Museum was designed to be a temporary structure that can be dismantled and reassembled in a series of cities around the world.
The first of its kind, this extraordinary building is made largely from renewable and recyclable materials: 148 empty shipping containers are stacked in a self-supporting grid to make the frame, while waterproof paper tubing is utilised in the columns and roof trusses. The pitched fabric-covered roof consists of simple steel girders spanning from the outer containers to the inner support columns.
As an integral part of the aesthetic experience, the building successfully frames a poetic context for viewing Colbert’s work: with no natural light inside, the photographs appear to float in a mystical space.
Date: Completed in 2005
