Leong Leong’s proposal for Swiss Institute relocates the contemporary art institution from a compact, vertically stacked building at 38 St. Marks Place to the ground floor and cellar of 250 Bowery. The design treats the move as a shift from container to constellation. At St. Marks, each program sits in its own room on its own floor. At Bowery, galleries, bookstore, cafe, library, and community workshop share a single horizontal plane behind a long storefront on one of downtown Manhattan’s most important cultural streets.

The storefront becomes the institution’s civic interface. The entry moves to a central bay, with the bookstore and cafe flanking it, so the depth of the main gallery is visible from the sidewalk. A thickened threshold along the window bays holds an anchor system for hanging panels, vinyl, sculpture, and artist interventions. Public events that took place on the St. Marks rooftop move to street level, where the life of the sidewalk overlaps with the exhibition spaces.

The galleries are organized as a continuous L. The larger gallery uses a movable wall system developed from the walls Leong Leong designed for the School of Visual Arts MA Curatorial Practice program, which have been in continuous use for over a decade. Walls hang from an overhead track, carry power and data through their base reveals, and can be repositioned by two people in under an hour. Artists can treat them as finished gallery surfaces or strip them to the plywood and steel frame. A flexible room with sliding doors opens to either gallery or closes for blackout projection and sound work. Across both phases, exhibition space grows from 3,000 to approximately 5,000 square feet, and community, workshop, and library space more than triples.

The project extends Swiss Institute’s commitment to environmental responsibility as a founding member of the Gallery Climate Coalition. Working with reuse consultant Dave Bennink, the design carries components from St. Marks into the new space, including the SI neon sign, USM Haller shelving, library doors, and terrazzo stair treads. In Phase 2, the existing knockout slab is saw-cut and reused as landings and structure for a new stair that connects the ground floor to a cellar gallery. The movable walls eliminate the cycle of building and demolishing temporary walls between shows.

“Swiss Institute has always balanced a precise identity with an open, public platform,” says Dominic Leong. “250 Bowery lets those two qualities share the same floor. A bookstore visitor can drift into a gallery, and a neighborhood workshop can share a wall with a show. The architecture gives the institution the tools to decide, exhibition by exhibition, how porous it wants to be.”