The Guggenheim Collection Center weaves together the public and the private, solid and transparent, and inside and outside. A major off-site art storage facility and consolidated administrative offices for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, the building is located on a highly visible site in East Harlem, with the ambition of integrating community space into the highly secure facility. WORKac’s design balances these competing needs by wrapping a vertical core of column-free storage space with a transparent envelope that becomes a thickened, inhabitable trajectory, where the public and the building’s inhabitants intermingle.

The design strategically inserts two horizontal cuts – an open ground-level lobby, with access to the underground auditorium, and a public roof garden at the fourth floor, which separates the building into two volumes. Inscribed as a figure in the gridded façade, a public promenade leads to the community meeting rooms and research library on the garden level, where it intersects with a second, private promenade connecting the shared spaces of the garden level to the upper office floors through a series of double-height meeting rooms and lounges.