Gallery and Studio / Johnsen Schmaling Architects

Located in in the heart of Racine, the Gallery and Studio building was designed for a painter and local art advocate who set out to create a new cultural anchor for the city, one that would help revitalize Racine’s currently anemic downtown. The project pairs the painter’s own studio on the upper level with a street level art gallery. Sitting on a narrow sliver of vacant land at the end of a trapezoid city block shaped by two overlapping urban grids, the 3,250 sf. building caps the block of historic brick structures and re-establishes the street edges along two important thoroughfares that connect Racine’s western neighborhoods with Lake Michigan.