Drive, She Said

A San Antonio auto shop, converted by Poteet Architects, propels the Linda Pace Foundation into the future

David Sokol -- Interior Design, 8/1/2008 12:00:00 AM

Perhaps because she didn't pursue her passion until later in life, Linda Pace threw herself into the art world with a fiery intensity. Between her decision in the late 1980's to collect, fund, and create art and her death in 2007 from breast cancer, the San Antonio–based Pace Foods salsa heiress transformed herself into one of the most influential women in contemporary art—it was her intuition for sniffing out emerging artists that particularly earned her renown. Many of the talents chosen for her Artpace residency program, which opened its doors in her home city in 1995, have gone on to fame and honors. Jeremy Deller won the Turner Prize in 2004, shortly after his stay; Mona Hatoum, Isaac Julien, and Cornelia Parker earned nominations for the $80,000 British award.

Pace's knack for talent-scouting extended from artists to architecture studios. Artpace's home is a 1920's auto showroom converted by Lake/Flato Architects back in 1994, when the firm was just 10 years old. Her own home, where she lived with her adoptive granddaughter, was a condominium in a candy factory transformed by Poteet Architects in 2005, only eight years after it was founded by Jim Poteet. In 2006, she hired him to refashion a dilapidated 1940's auto shop as a studio where she could practice her art, mostly large-scale assemblage work.

The Linda Pace Foundation's president, Rick Moore, remembers walking through the 2,500-square-foot building before the renovation. Rusty holes pierced the corrugated roof of the long-abandoned shop, and such artifacts of its past life as a vintage Cadillac fender littered the dirt floor. "Linda was a big believer in structures," Moore recalls. "She said, 'I don't know what this will be someday, but let's keep it as it is.'"

While honoring the spirit of "let's keep it as it is," Poteet's gut rehab pragmatically included pouring a new concrete floor, replacing the roof and inserting a row of six skylights, and adding a kitchen and a restroom. He also installed a garage door.

"Linda liked the idea of driving her car right in," he says. "Though, actually, she never did." Indeed, she had only six months to enjoy her studio. But she did so furiously. When she died, shelves lining the perimeter were packed with the cookie jars, mannequin parts, and prayer candles that made up her assemblages.

Her patronage of both art and design continues posthumously. Besides granting $1 million to Artpace every year, the Linda Pace Foundation recently brought Poteet back to turn her studio into the foundation's headquarters. As Poteet says, "We got another crack at it." His redesign attempts to make foundation employees and visitors feel as if they're "kind of inhabiting Linda's body," he says.

The second renovation involved just slightly updating the kitchen and the restroom and supplementing existing carpenter-built trusses with additional structural members, set at odd angles. Poteet's biggest move was to build a central volume to house four offices and a conference room. The latter benefits from sunlight filtered through runs of translucent polycarbonate wall panels. People enter through a pair of bright orange doors by Jorge Pardo—once installed in Pace's bedroom. The conference room's Harry Bertoia chairs and Eero Saarinen table formerly inhabited her home gallery.

Pace's onetime studio assistant, now registrar of the foundation, Kelly O'Connor oversaw the hanging of works that are personally meaningful. Stills from a Julien video once exhibited in Pace's loft now grace Moore's office. Photography by Rivane Neuenschwander, once on view over Pace's desk, now hang in the entry gallery.

On the foundation building's opening night, two acquisitions by Daniel Joseph Martinez were unveiled. A text work, his meditation on the pain of beauty, is painted in black on the white rear elevation. Out front—in the area named Chrispark in memory of Pace's son—two Martinez figures in Carrara marble represent Huey Newton and Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party. The Martinez pieces join a collection comprising 525 others by various artists and 100 of Pace's own, clearly far too many to be shown inside. They're eventually destined for a private museum to be designed by Adjaye Associates's David Adjaye, another architect Pace discovered early in his career.

Top: New skylights punctuate the steel roof above Daniel Joseph Martinez's text painting on the back of the building. Bottom: Jorge Pardo's Untitled (Doors), in acrylic and painted MDF, opens to the conference room.

Opposite top: During the building's previous incarnation as Pace's studio, she filled the space with components for assemblages such as her Furry Volkswagen, covered in wool. Photography: Mike Osborne. Opposite bottom: Newly poured concrete flooring flows past the central conference room to the aluminum-framed glass garage door.

Left: The administrative office features Francis Stark's paper collage Red (50% Head). Right: In the entry gallery, lounge chairs and an Eero Saarinen side table from Pace's apartment gather beneath Belong, Not Belong, a nine-part photographic work by Rivane Neuenschwander. A break-out area is beyond.

Opposite: The hand-painted glass cubes of Burnout by Teresita Fernández, a 1998 Artpace resident, transform a wall in the conference room, where Harry Bertoia's chairs surround Saarinen's table.

This page: Anna Gaskell's photograph Untitled #78 (Resemblance) and Roxy Paine's plastic Scumak Object (Coral #12) appear in the registrar's office.

Opposite top: The site is in an industrial neighborhood undergoing redevelopment just south of downtown. Opposite bottom, from left: Steel studs frame the polycarbonate panels around the conference room. After Paradise Suite C, a triptych of stills from Isaac Julien's video Paradise Omeros, hangs in the president's office, furnished with wool-upholstered chairs and a glass-topped powder-coated steel table.

Below: Carrara marble representations of Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, founding members of the Black Panther Party, Martinez's A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love. . . stands beside the limestone pavers leading to the entry. This outdoor space is named Chrispark in memory of Pace's son, David Christopher Goldsbury.

PROJECT TEAM BRETT FREEMAN; ISADORA SINTES; SHANE VALENTINE: POTEET ARCHITECTS. LEHMANN ENGINEERING: STRUCTURAL ENGINEER. NICKS CUSTOM WOODWORKING: WOODWORK. RUBIOLA CONSTRUCTION: GENERAL CONTRACTOR. PRODUCT SOURCES FROM FRONT VELUX: SKYLIGHTS (EXTERIOR). PITTSBURGH PAINTS: PAINT. ARTEMIDE: TASK LAMP (ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICE). HERMAN MILLER: TASK CHAIRS (ADMINISTRATIVE, REGISTRAR'S OFFICES), CHAIRS (BREAK-OUT AREA). STEELCASE: GUEST CHAIRS (ADMINISTRATIVE, PRESIDENT'S OFFICES), DESK, FILE CABINET (REGISTRAR'S OFFICE). KNOLL: TABLES (GALLERY, BREAK-OUT AREA), TABLE, CHAIRS (CONFERENCE ROOM). INTERFACEFLOR: CARPET (CONFERENCE ROOM, PRESIDENT'S OFFICE). POLYGAL PLASTICS INDUSTRIES: PANEL MATERIAL (CONFERENCE ROOM). HUNTER DOUGLAS: CEILING SYSTEM. THROUGH DESIGN WITHIN REACH: TABLE (PRESIDENT'S OFFICE). COOPER LIGHTING: SCONCES (EXTERIOR). THROUGHOUT LSI INDUSTRIES: TRACK LIGHTING. ZUMTOBEL: LINEAR FIXTURES. SHERWIN-WILLIAMS COMPANY: PAINT.