Seven years ago, some three decades after the artist Chie Hammons started practicing Vajra dance, she decided she needed a dedicated space for it. The art form, from the Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, requires up to a dozen dancers to perform a step sequence in languid movements around a mandala; Hammons, 61, envisioned a “circular structure with a high, vaulted ceiling,” she says, “that had large windows open to the four directions,” not only to bring in natural light but to connect the interior and exterior. It would be built on top of a ridge near the home she shares with her husband, the artist David Hammons, on a 79-acre plot in Livingston, N.Y., where they’ve lived part time for the past decade.
She and her dancers enter the studio through a dark and windowless foyer from which unfurls a 16-foot-long corridor that curves counterclockwise around the structure. Eventually they arrive at a central 1,000-square-foot room that “opens up and expands outward,” says the designer Bret Quagliara, 45, who along with the architect Andrew Feuerstein, 45, completed the project earlier this year with their colleagues at the Brooklyn-based firm Group Projects.
Once inside, you can’t help but look up toward the six-foot-wide oculus in the center of an oak-clad conical ceiling that rises 24 feet off the ground: As the sun passes across the round skylight, it casts a golden oval that marks the hours like a sundial. “For us, the more basic the form, the better,” Feuerstein says. “We want the quality of the light to speak for itself.” Here there’s pale, heavily textured plaster on the walls and white oak on the floor (a material they’ve used in many of their previous residential projects), all of which is intended to swallow and reflect sunshine. Save for a single bench and two low-profile wooden storage consoles, the room is empty. The sliding doors at each of the four cardinal points all but vanish thanks to their silent Swiss ball bearings and minimal-distortion German glass.
For Hammons, the exposed natural surroundings — cedar trees, bluestem grass, a pond nearby bordered by swaying cattails — are as crucial to the meditative dance as they are to the building’s design. The architects adopted the idea of engawa (the porchlike area in Japanese homes that serves as a threshold between inside and out) when creating a walkway that surrounds the studio, laying down gravel and Brazilian mahogany under the zinc roof’s overhang. Beneath the path, there’s also a hidden cellar: Through a staircase off the entryway, Hammons can access her own powder room and modest kitchenette, where she makes tea to drink on a small patio that faces the Catskill Mountains.
Like the Vajra dance, the space reveals itself gradually. One day, its concrete exterior will be finished in a blue-gray wash to match the sky. Soon the mandala — for now a tarp under the oculus — will be permanently painted onto the floor. There just hasn’t been time. Or perhaps time passes more slowly here. Tomorrow, next spring: The sun will always come back again.
Photo assistant: Anthony Rhoades
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