This is the Brooklyn studio of artists (and married couple) Lorna Simpson and James Casebere. Alix Brownem wrote for New York Times Magazine: "The four-story building, on the site of a former carriage house, is the first American project by the London-based architect David Adjaye...The Vanderbilt Studio, as the Brooklyn building is called, is armored in polypropelene panels that are normally used for shipping containers. As with Adjaye’s other buildings, the exterior wall provides a protective screen from the city. Just inside, an entryway, which Adjaye says was inspired by entryways typical of Japanese architecture and traditional rural structures, creates a threshold between the street and the studio. 'It also has practical implications,' Adjaye says, referring to what might inelegantly be described as an air shaft. 'But the primary idea is to create a transition from the outside world to the world of thinking and creating.' For Adjaye, who is interested in how private buildings can be designed to respond to the complexities of urban life, it was important that the Vanderbilt Studio function as a work space without wholly feeling like one. Its inverted pyramid roofscape, a nod to the local gabled architecture, coyly suggests that this mysterious black box might even contain a house. Or perhaps just the idea of one. 'We love being here,' Simpson says. 'It’s nicer than home.'
New York Times Magazine