Boris Stoyanov
Spring 2025
East Hampton, NY
Sculpture Gallery
Professor Robert Marino
The East End Gallery takes its name from the way New York’s Abstract Expressionists once referred to the eastern end of Long Island. Before the Hamptons became a site of wealth and spectacle, it was a practical extension of the city. Artists went east because it was accessible, affordable, and bright. Small fishing shacks could be rented or bought cheaply and adapted into studios. The Hamptons just happened to provide the conditions necessary to work.
The project occupies the former home and workshop of Philip Pavia and Natalie Edgar and is conceived as an archive and museum for their work. Rather than relocating the material into an arbitrary institutional setting, the project remains on the land where the work was produced. The architecture does not treat the site as a neutral container but as an active participant in the reading of the work. The conditions that shaped the art are preserved as part of its interpretation.
A central concern of the project is the Vernacular construction on Long Island. These methods are not reproduced as forms but understood as systems—ways of assembling, stacking, and working with available material and local skillsets. The architecture utilizes these techniques without imitating their forms. This allows material logic, rather than referential aesthetics, to guide the design.
Stone is the primary material through which this logic is developed. Pavia was a self-proclaimed sculptor of marble, not stone. In Pavia’s view, marble has skin- a surface condition that supley gathers light, just as our skin would. Its form is read through illumination, not mass alone. Without light, marble loses much of its character. This relationship between material and light is foundational.
Alabaster Study Models
In this regard, alabaster is like marble, but even more so. Like marble, it is translucent, but more extremely. It is inexpensive, widely available, and soft enough to be worked easily. Alabaster is crystallized gypsum, soft enough to be scratched with a fingernail. These properties allow it to function less as structure and more as a medium for light. The material is chosen not for durability or monumentality, but for its ability to modulate illumination and for its financial feasibility.
This leads to the project’s primary architectural move: a large gabion wall filled entirely with alabaster along the southern edge of the site. Its purpose is to transform southern light into a condition closer to northern light, which is more suitable for viewing both painting and sculpture. The wall is a datum that defines the landscape. Its height is calibrated to block direct sunlight, even at the summer solstice.
Complete control, however, is neither possible nor desired. Gabion construction is inherently irregular. Gaps remain between stones, allowing light to pass through unevenly. The field to the north receives a scattered and changing light condition rather than uniform shade. The result is not a fixed environment but one that acknowledges variability as a material reality.
The building housing Edgar’s paintings sits just beyond the wall, within its shadow. Raised on stilts, it is accessed by ascending stairs, yet the experience inside reads as grounded rather than elevated. A rubble wall slopes upward along the building’s northern edge, producing a spatial inversion: one climbs to arrive in a condition that feels embedded in the earth. Stone is used here to disrupt expectation rather than to reinforce hierarchy.
Throughout the project, material and light are treated as inseparable. Stone is not employed as inert mass, and light is not assumed as a passive condition. The East End Gallery is structured around the idea that art is read through light, and that architecture, when taken seriously, is responsible for shaping that reading.