In Brooklyn, New York, Ravi Raj Architect transforms an industrial shell into Glenn Ligon’s 8,000-square-foot studio, where weathered steel and precision craft fuse past and present into a living workspace.
At 8,000 square feet, the studio was conceived not as a pristine white box but as an instrument—a place that can endure the scale and intensity of Glenn Ligon’s practice while amplifying its material resonances. Ravi Raj’s design translates a century of industrial memory into an environment that is both grounded and forward-looking.
The project pivots on a monumental steel-and-timber console, a kind of anchor around which the studio organizes itself. Salvaged from the Brooklyn Navy Yards, its steel surfaces retain a textured patina that speaks of shipbuilding, salt air, and labor. In Raj’s hands, this weathered matter does not become nostalgic artifact but rather a tool for the present: a workbench, archive, and display system in one. It is a sculptural presence, but also utterly pragmatic—capable of supporting canvases, neon, and the unpredictable rhythms of large-scale installation.
What distinguishes Raj’s intervention is his refusal to overwrite the building’s existing language. He works instead by amplification, letting the scars of the site dictate form and material. The console’s industrial weight is counterbalanced with precisely milled timber, an interlacing of warmth and severity that reflects Ligon’s own explorations of tension—between word and silence, history and erasure, power and vulnerability. The studio becomes a mirror of artistic methodology, where contradictions are not smoothed over but allowed to converse.
The larger space unfolds in this same key. Concrete floors absorb the spill and grit of making; exposed beams frame the East River as both backdrop and reminder of the city’s working past. Moments of refinement—a joint, a threshold, a rhythm of natural light—interrupt the rawness with poise. Critics note the atmosphere as simultaneously raw and composed, and this paradox is the project’s strength. It acknowledges the reality of production—the mess, the noise, the failures—while offering a framework of clarity in which reflection and critique can thrive.
Artist’s Studio is a study in durability, not just in the physical sense but in the cultural one. By iterating upon existing materials, Raj channels an ethic of reuse that feels particularly urgent in 2025, while also grounding an artist’s future output in the echoes of a working city.
