Art Studios: How artistic processes inform architectural design

31 minutes ago
4 min read

An exhibition by Grigori Fateyev and Art Forms Architecture

Woodshed Gallery, Chesterwood

May 16th - July 19th

As a 2024 artist-in-residence at Chesterwood, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, Grigori Fateyev began a series of drawings exploring the organization of space in the residency’s house and gardens, originally designed by architect Henry Bacon as a Berkshires summer home and studio for prominent late 19th–, early 20^th–century sculptor Daniel Chester French. Raised in St. Petersburg, Russia, Fateyev started his academic training in theatrical set design at the State Institute of Theater, Music, and Cinematography before gravitating toward art, and eventually architecture, at Cooper Union. He moved to Great Barrington, Massachusetts in 1999 and founded Art Forms Architecture ten years later, since then dedicating himself to tailoring galleries, studios, and homes to the particular habits and work processes of artists. On display through July 19 at Chesterwood’s Woodshed Gallery, alongside three of Fateyev’s designs for artist’s studios and live/work homes in the Hudson Valley and Berkshires, it shows Fateyev’s passion for the thinking process behind design and for the details of architectural drawing. His use of color and line in sketches, watercolors, and aerial site plans reflect the obsession with fine hand-drawn lines—expressive yet suggesting mechanical precision—characteristic of Cooper Union graduates, influenced even today by the tradition of former dean John Hejduk.

With his concentration on designing spaces for artists, the artist-architect relationship between Henry Bacon and Daniel Chester French held a unique historical interest. Fateyev’s Chesterwood drawings began as a study of Bacon and French’s collaboration in the conception of the Stockbridge summer home. French had already established himself as a leading sculptor of public monuments at 24 years old with his 1874 Minute Man statue in Concord, Massachusetts, commemorating the state’s Revolutionary War militias. By the time Chesterwood was built in 1898, French had realized memorials of famous political figures across the country and a towering 65-foot-tall statue for the 1893 Columbia Exposition in Chicago. Henry Bacon began his architecture career in the renowned firm of McKim, Mead, and White and had recently started his own practice, designing libraries, educational buildings, and private residences. But he was already sketching designs and fundraising to build the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. A dozen years after the Chesterwood house was completed, the pair would receive the Lincoln Memorial commission, Bacon designing the neo-classical structure and reflecting pool, French sculpting the massive seated figure of Lincoln overlooking the mall.

The drawings on display in Art Studios began as earnest research. They portray an interplay of structures and landscapes informed by the place’s original design. But the studies took on a new dimension when Fateyev discovered that Chesterwood was contemplating building out its residency program, initiated in the 1970s, into a facility called the Woodthrush Art Center. It would be the first time the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which maintains the buildings and landscape, added dedicated facilities for artists. The discovery led Fateyev to explore the extended grounds and how to augment the architecture without interrupting the landmark design or the axial view from the house through the garden, which already suggested the Lincoln Memorial’s view overlooking the reflecting pool.

Fateyev focused in particular on the edge condition, where the Beaux-Arts house and garden meets the wild landscape at their boundary. An uncanny moment in the interface between the gardens and woods captured his attention. At the end of a pebble pathway, two classical columns frame an opening into the woods. Ionic pillars appear to be almost supporting the tree canopies. But there is no structure, only an aperture into the woods. In one photograph from the archives, a woman in a long white dress is seen standing in the shade beyond the columns. A bust on a pedestal is plunged deeper into the shadows, echoing the female figure. “When you start drawing it, you realize how much of the composition relies on the shadow line below the canopy,” he said. “He’s working with the edge of the woods as part of the composition.” The sequence became the key to Fateyev’s intervention: He sketched out an expansion of Chesterwood’s residency facilities as purpose-built multidisciplinary studios that appear as upright forms in a clearing in the woods, beyond the view of the studio. “The idea was to give Chesterwood the ability to host a couple of artists working in multiple disciplines and materials.”

Fateyev’s drawings and models emphasize the open spaces within a compound of studios and residential structures and begin to explore the composition and layout of the interiors. Along with the three other artist’s houses on display, they give a detailed sense of his sequencing of time and space in purpose-built structures for artists to live and work in. The other projects on display include Hudson Studios, a purpose-built studio and residence for a painter-and-sculptor couple in Hudson, New York; the Art Shed, a private art gallery, artwork storage, and studio for a painter in Great Barrington, Massachusetts; and a studio and residence in two overlapping volumes for multidisciplinary artist Anton Ginzburg in the Hudson Valley.

The drawings are a medium to share ideas, morphing in response to feedback, and a tool for spatial thinking. At Chesterwood’s Woodshed Gallery, they offer an exploration of the potential for new architecture on the campus and a view of the process of commissioning, designing, and constructing purpose-built and renovated structures for artists. The exhibition is meant to be a step in the direction of an eventual capital fundraising campaign by the National Trust for Historic Preservation to support resident artists and enable the original home—restored in 2014 after more than 115 years of wear and tear—to be more accessible to visitors.