Galeria Leon, 328 Leon Street El Paso, TX
It’s a story usual to many brick and stone lintel buildings that are being dusted off in the urban cores of America these days. But it comes with a graphical twist that’s a throwback to the retro era of arcade video games like Atari’s Pong – ironically the same period when the dust started to collect.
A vacant, single-story historic commercial building sits unused for years in a turn of the century red brick warehouse district in downtown El Paso, mostly stagnant since the closing of the Union Rail Depot in 1974. After some time, it becomes a car garage for 5-7 years, then a boxing gym for a couple of years. Then it sits vacant again, until being scooped up by a developer in the late 2000’s along with a few other local distressed properties.
The owner likes the small scale of this building and wants to develop it first. They want it to be a flexible, multipurpose space that can easily accommodate office use while also functioning as a 21st century art gallery. The purpose is to position the real estate to capitalize on a potential in the growth of the daytime population to this area of El Paso.
This building was a good deal, but one reason for its bargain is its relative obscurity. It is short, it is low, and its red brick façade blends in too well with the rest of the district. In other words, it lacks the identity to be the catalyst that it needs to be to keep more people in the neighborhood around the clock.
There’s the problem of identity, and as far as real estate goes, what’s on the outside matters a lot. The City of El Paso seems to think so too, and has a program in place called The Downtown Management District Façade Program. This program gives grants to developers to improve the exterior of their buildings in order to enhance the street frontages in the city.
The current façade is basically a single-story masonry wall containing glass windows and wooden doors, including an existing overhead wooden door in poor condition. It is a typical collusion of the classical industrial materials of brick, glass, wood, and metal. The district’s urban design guideline requires the façade to stay with these same traditional materials.
Here is a conflict in style – the space is to be a 21st century art gallery, and it wants to be contemporary. The owner wants to call it Galeria Leon (Leon Gallery). It needs a strong graphical identity, which could come in the form of high-resolution wizardry. But the city wants it to maintain the vestige of early 19th century industrial classicism.
So the architect decides to go low-resolution. He turns to an architectonic form of pixel art by defining the existing façade as a low-resolution raster surface made up of the few “colors” of brick, glass, wood, and steel.
In other words, the architect is inviting us to imagine the façade to be like one of those old video game screens with an invisible grid of large squares. The larger size of squares means that there are only a few variations in the colors, hence the limited palette of traditional materials. We can see this pixel grid already there in the form of the lines given off by the brick and mortar and the square panes of the existing windows and doors.
Going low resolution for the purpose of enhancing the individual pixel squares is called pixilation. You can zoom into an image on your computer to see the individual colors that are represented by square pixels, or bitmaps. The images become a mosaic that emphasizes the role of the individual colors in composing the whole. You can clearly see the edges of the color squares. There is no use of antialiasing, a technology used to blur the hard square edges to give the effect of a smoother transition between colors.
To pixelate the façade at 328 Leon Street, the architect strips away paint, defines edges for the new paint, adds square decals to new window glass while adding rusted metal Corten plates to the front door. Square frosted glass panes and metal panes are inserted into the grid of the new aluminum overhead garage door. By adhering to the grid line, the individuality of each construction material is enhanced.
To identify the building by its address, the numbers ‘328’ are blown up to an oversized 8 feet in height. Its edges are kept smooth, as if the numbers themselves are stencils which expose the raw, pixelated construction materials within their edges while the rest of the brick and mortar of the façade is painted a blank white.
The façade needs to consider one more architectural feature – shading. The building sits a stone’s throw away from the US/Mexico border in the hot Chihuahuan Desert. Shading is needed, but the traditionally solid surface of a canopy would ruin the defined grid modules of the rest of the façade. So at the top of the first two address numbers, the pixilation is scaled down and over four hundred rebars of one-inch diameter are pushed out from the building in varying lengths, thus creating steel canopies that provide shade to the interior of the building. At the same time, these canopies start to act as a nighttime lampshade to the exposed utilitarian light bulbs that are placed at the bottom center of the canopies. This satisfies the dark sky requirement of the district, and in a single thrust accomplishes two purposes.
The steel rebar canopies are a delightful touch to the façade’s new identity. The contrast between the variously scaled pixels of the steel rebar, the windows, and the doors is low resolution yet highly defined. It’s a solution that makes inventive use of traditional, classical materials for a 21st century effect that embraces rather than ignores the era that brought about its first demise.
Construction was completed in 2012 and since then the Galeria Leon is firmly established in the neighborhood and has been generating great returns to the owner as a creative office space.