By Sophia Stewart

Nestled between brick warehouses and metal depots, a new and surprisingly nondescript art campus has opened in Brooklyn. Made out of several squat, concrete structures, the Amant Foundation’s New York outpost is located on a quiet, industrial street in East Williamsburg. I was expecting Amant to be incongruous at best, a gaudy symbol of gentrification at worst. But Amant looks to be at home alongside its neighboring structures, which house a mishmash of practical and creative enterprises: a meat market, truck repair shop, and restaurant supply store sit comfortably among a craft brewery, photography studio, and two separate recording studios.

By Josephine Minutillo

Next door is a slaughterhouse. Down the block are busy warehouses and a truck depot; a few hundred yards away, a rundown hall for exotic dancers. It’s not where you’d expect to find an arts center or, for that matter, its philanthropist founder hanging out. But it is this gritty part of East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY, to which Lonti Ebers would frequently travel to visit the studios of the artists she collects, and where she decided to create a residency for other rising stars.

By Samuel Medina

The Amant Foundation in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is the latest addition to New York’s cultural circuit. It also goes by the name Amant Art Campus, which inspires more than a few associations, above all the cloistered calm of, say, an East Coast university quadrangle (canonically Princeton’s, but take your pick). The campus, Latin for untrammeled recreational ground, is a protective cocoon against the outside world and all its banal commitments. The other word that comes to mind is microcosm, suggesting miniaturist reproduction, as inside a snow globe.

By Kat Barandy

SO — IL and the Amant Foundation celebrated the opening of the newly completed Amant art campus in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The campus is divided between two separate pairs of buildings which face each other on either side of the street. the first has just opened this Saturday, July 10th and is programmed with galleries, performance spaces, and a café and bookstore. The second group — defined by its closed-off façade and single, sculptural window at street level — is expected to complete later this year and will host artists residences and studio spaces. Unlike its inward-facing counterpart, the completed galleries are designed to open out to the neighborhood, weaving into the sidewalk.

By Justin Davidson

For most of my life as a lover of architecture, I’ve been on the hunt for a new Tempietto. The 16th-century original, a cylindrical tomb hidden in a cramped church courtyard in Rome, is a work of miniature grandeur. With its cupola on a gallery above a balustrade over a colonnade on a plinth, the many-layered little temple distills High Renaissance sublimity into a compact package. Because of it, I’m attracted to other projects that are modest in scale and rich in experience, delights of introverted finesse. Such buildings are vanishingly rare in a contemporary city that values obviousness, generic luxury, and bigness. Today’s public architecture often takes place on a scale that would make an emperor blush; instead of enfolding humans a few at a time, giant buildings manage throngs. Instead of asking us to linger on detail, they clobber us with awe.

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