Hemp Art Studio

Five Room Campus is a collective of new and renovated buildings on a glacial hill outside of Germantown New York for a pair of painters re-establishing themselves on the east coast after many years of working and teaching in California.

Schedule

location: Germantown, New York
type: artist studio
general contractor: Lydon Builders Inc.
landscape design: Tami Banh
photography: Michael Vahrenwald / ESTO

Combining living, working, and gathering spaces for the painters and their extended family, construction work concentrates around a set of five “rooms” scattered across the hillside. The first is a large, open-concept kitchen and living room; the second and third are painting studios in a newly-built outbuilding; the fourth is a currently unfinished garage that will house overflow working and sleeping quarters: and the fifth is a lightly-organized clearing in a re-wilded meadow that occupies the remainder of the site.

Rooms two and three occupy a hemp-lined studio building constructed on the northern frontier of the lot, creating the campus enclosure. The building is an irregular rhombus with the wider northern facade housing clerestory windows. Within, two painting studios divide the volume in half, with a small bathroom on one side and a vestibule with a sink on the other. The art studio is built from engineered lumber, insulated with hemp, and wrapped in a vibrant recyclable aluminum cladding. Resting on a fiberglass-reinforced slab that absorbs carbon dioxide, the building combines ecological and functional performance with a distinct architectural identity.

Taken together, these five rooms form a cohesive compound, and a base for new paintings and expanded communities of friends and family.