Interlacements: A Gallery Roofed in Strung Leaves That Paints With Interstitial Light

Most galleries treat daylight as a threat to be managed: diffused, baffled, filtered until it carries no information about the hour or the season. Interlacements does the opposite. It hangs a roof of autumn leaves over the exhibition floor and lets the sun fall through in stripes, flecks and patches, so that every painting is seen through a shifting veil of weather.

Interlacements is a project by Dayana Ludlow, Shortlisted at Art-ade. The design describes itself as an "hortus conclusus", the enclosed garden, built from alternating patterns of vegetation and roofing structures. Light passes through countless interstices and answers to landscape elements scattered across the plan, with the stated aim of evoking unity in multiplicity. It is a proposal that takes time, colour and form as its real exhibits, and uses the artwork almost as a pretext for watching them change.

A Ceiling Strung With Foliage Instead of Louvres

The defining gesture sits overhead. Thin horizontal bands carry clusters of ochre, rust and green leaves across a glazed roof, so the sky reads through the gaps as a broken mosaic of blue. From below, the effect is closer to standing under a pergola in late October than inside a white cube. The foliage is not a decorative afterthought on a conventional shed; it is the roof's working layer, the device that cuts the light into pieces before it reaches the floor.

That fragmentation is the point. On the floor, the leaves become shadow, and the shadow lands on low white plinths where framed works lie flat like specimens in a seed tray. Visitors move between them as silhouettes, and the canopy's colour seems to rain down on the pale timber. The interior becomes a single field of light rather than a sequence of rooms.

Display Tables Laid Out Like Garden Beds

The exhibition floor borrows its order from the garden it claims to be. Glass-edged tables and open frames are set out in loose rows, with railings and stepped levels dropping between them, and from above the arrangement resembles planted beds divided by paths. Works sit horizontally, read from above, which suits the overhead light and lets the slatted shadows cross the art itself.

Looking down the double-height hall, the layering compounds: leaves above, screens to the sides, tables and steps below. Each plane is perforated, so nothing quite closes the view. This is the project's argument for "interlacement" at its most literal, a weave of horizontal and vertical members that holds the visitor inside a lattice of light.

Slatted Screens and the Trouble With Striped Light

Elsewhere the plan opens into bays defined by slender white frame columns, with paintings hung on freestanding walls beneath the leafy canopy. At dusk the slatted screen walls glow warm, the floor turns reflective and the scattered foliage overhead goes dark against an orange sky. These are the most atmospheric images in the set, and they also expose the project's central tension: a light pattern this strong competes with the work it is meant to serve.

That tension did not escape the jury. Jorge Frias & Irene Zurdo, who judged Art-ade, read the scheme as a successful landscape intervention but questioned whether its weave of light and shadow would suit the contemplation of art.

Buen proyecto como intervención paisajística, pero no lo consideramos como un espacio ideal para contemplar obras de arte ya que la trama planteada ofrecería demasiado contraste entre luces y sombras.Jorge Frias & Irene Zurdo, Arquitecto, ESTUDIO JI ARQUITECTOS, Spain

It is a fair critique and a revealing one. The striped bars of sun crossing the canvases in these renderings are precisely what the design celebrates, and precisely what a curator would fight. The project chooses atmosphere over neutrality, and it makes that choice openly.

A Double-Height Hall Over a Buried Wing

In section the scheme gains depth. A double-height hall looks out toward rows of autumn trees, the multicoloured ceiling running the full width while striped sunlight falls to a lower floor where figures gather. Below, a plan labelled N-3.10 shows a column grid with restrooms, a stair and a long rectangular wing, lit from above by skylights through which the strung leaves remain visible. Even underground, the canopy is never fully out of sight.

A long white corridor makes the strongest case for the idea. Framed works line one wall; the other is a deep shelved surface threaded with red and gold foliage, and the leaf ceiling runs the length of the space. Here the light falls in broad soft planes rather than fine stripes, and the art holds its own against the garden.

A Facade Woven in Seasonal Bands

The presentation board pulls the strategy outward. The section elevation reads as a long horizontal weave of coloured strips, and the street view sets that striated volume behind a row of red autumn trees, so the building echoes the canopy it sits beside. An exploded axonometric separates the stack plainly: a foliage layer on top, a glazed enclosure, stepped floors, and a solid base. The logic is legible at a glance, which is more than many atmospheric proposals manage.

Painterly Views of a Garden Made of Frames

Two final images abandon photorealism for something closer to oil paint. A view through framing columns toward a deep hall dissolves the leaf ceiling into horizontal smears of colour, and a collage stacks a sunset field of haystacks above the same interior, threaded with white cube outlines that drift across the landscape. These are not technical drawings; they are the project's manifesto, an insistence that the building should be read the way one reads a painting built from broken brushstrokes that resolve into a whole.

Why This Project Matters

Interlacements refuses the default assumption that a gallery must erase its surroundings to honour its contents. By roofing the exhibition floor in strung foliage and filtering every surface through slats and frames, it proposes a museum whose primary material is changing light, a building that will look different in each hour and each season. The hortus conclusus framing gives that ambition a clear spatial form: an enclosed garden where art is one of the things growing.

The jury's objection marks the limit of the idea, and that limit is instructive. A design this committed to contrast forces the question of how much atmosphere a work of art can bear, and the answer is unlikely to be the same for every room. The corridor, with its softer planes of light, hints at a calibrated version of the scheme, one where the garden recedes where it must and blooms where it can. That is the conversation this project opens, and it is worth having.

View the Full Project

Project team

Designer: Dayana Ludlow

Competition and award

Shortlisted, Art-ade

Jury

Jorge Frias & Irene Zurdo, Arquitecto, ESTUDIO JI ARQUITECTOS, Spain

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