JENSEN at 30: Creative Minds

“Inspiration comes from willingly stepping outside the bounds of our profession and engaging with the vantage points of other creative disciplines,” says Mark Jensen, noting that the most successful architecture for arts spaces are generous in their capacity to foster creative occupation and encourage reinterpretation—even misuse. Jensen Architects’ designs aspire beyond a prescriptive “form-follows-function” approach. He believes that the best spaces “have strong character and solicit engagement from creative and curious users.”

Last year, the exhibition “Designing Peace,” organized by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum opened at the Museum of Craft and Design. Designers Christina Kull and Chenyu Huang developed an exhibition design that embodied the theme and connected the iconic peace logo—expressed as an oversized display table—to San Francisco’s anti-war legacies. 

“The pieces showcased in “Designing Peace” were truly awe-inspiring, addressing a wide spectrum of human rights and social justice concerns, ranging from global issues to those deeply personal and local in nature,” says Kull. But accommodating these works in the gallery posed a challenge: a relatively small gallery with an exceptionally tall ceiling. Huang explains that inspiration came from this context. “We understood the sequence of how people circulate the space and where people tended to stop,” she notes. The team devised a design approach that, in Kull’s words, “would encourage meaningful engagement and dialogue, even if it meant confronting discomfort, both with the art and among visitors.”

“Art occurs in the process of life itself,” said conceptual artist David Ireland (1930-2009) in an 1983 interview. He lived out that philosophy for 34 years in his home in San Francisco’s Mission District. The Italianate style house at 500 Capp Street is considered his greatest artwork—a wunderkammer of found objects and site specific installations made from the remains of the everyday. Jensen Architects preserved the 1886 building when it reopened as the 500 Capp Street Foundation in 2015, working under the vision of founder and trustee Carlie Wilmans. Taking care not to disrupt the fragile layers of Ireland’s art, we stabilized the foundation and added a basement-level archive. Today, the arts nonprofit uses the new and revitalized spaces to host exhibitions and public programs.

“An encouragement to see the world anew is inherent in cultural production,” says Mark Jensen. It’s a sentiment that resonates with Ireland’s work. “One of the joys of designing for artists and arts organizations is being pushed past predictable, default architectural solutions.” Read more about the David Ireland House.