art in the city | precedents | Steven Holl | Storefront for Art and Architecture, 1993  
"The interactive dynamic of the gallery argued for an inside-out facade, which addresses insular art and turns it out to he public street. Hinged walls rotate on both axes, which allows some to become tables and benches. The body is linked to wall forms in the crude way that the shoulder is needed to push space out or pull it in. 

Rather than pure, minimal space, this space is crossbred. It can be exact and then suddenly change into dynamic combinative space. It can be severe or easygoing. When the facade is closed, it takes the typological form of a Manhattan triangular  slice of a shop front. When it is open, it becomes drawn in to the city outside. The three dimensional volume can be disposed towards the four dimensional with changes in time. With this facade, the Storefront realized a new type of dynamic, urban interactive space... " -Steven Holl, 2000

With the Storefront for Art and Architecture, Steven Holl and Vito Acconi  realized a space in which the reading of the work of art displayed is radically charged with its surrounding environment. Contents and context thus dialectically imply one and other. 

The 'framing' of the work of art in the normative context of the modern gallery is a condition of bracketing the work. Thus the work can be read as (work), isolating itself in the apparently neutral field of the white wall. With the condition of the Storefront, the work becomes an insertion into the dynamic field of inverted brackets. The work can now be read as )work(.