Proposed for the American Craft Museum relocation, the Huntington Hartford Building, odd as it is, has a place in the cultural memory of the city - a kind of sleeping beauty. So we searched for ways to keep as much of it as possible. Awakening the building with the minimum of moves seemed like the right kind of economical construct to create both identity and amenity.

The design strategy evolved through efforts to improve circulation and exhibit space. The obsolete main museum stair (floors 2-5) needed to be addressed. It was slid north outside the exterior skin of the existing building to catch views north. It is enclosed in a picture postcard of watery slumped glass - a homage to the building’s Venetian roots and the craft of glass making. The new stair links the museum floors and affords watery views north and reciprocally offers the city a generous watery view into the museum. We looked at removing the curved concrete wall behind (an expensive proposition) to get a view deep into the museum but chose instead to make modulations to the concrete wall on the 2nd and 5th floors to create bay windows with a view. Keeping the wall was more evocative, maintained light controlled exhibit space and highlighted that aspect of the original design that E.D. Stone loved so much – the curve afforded by the plasticity of concrete.

Both object and process underpin the Museum philosophy with studios and classrooms on the 6th floor. Searching for a strategy to provide windows for these spaces, we noticed that the existing facades with their perforated borders and gridded marble fields resembled incomplete needlework samplers and looked at needlework for inspiration. Impressed, as non-knitters, with the abstract notation of gridded knitting patterns, we experimented... notated windows as bobbles and added LED lights to the grids requiring purl stitches. Empty grids notate knit and diagonal aluminum bars, cable. The resulting pattern, transformed into a knitted sampler might, we thought, be made available in the gift store.