11 x 17: Minuscules
One of six installations for the online exhibition by winners of the 2025 League Prize.
Overall view from the entrance. A white box is inserted into the existing pizza shop in a fragmented manner. Image credit: James Florio
Inside a former pizza shop, modest and unassuming, an architectural exhibition takes shape—not through spectacle, but through calibrated spatial disruption. Rather than overwrite its context, the project draws out its residue. The white box doesn’t arrive intact; it is parsed into fragments—planes that hover, lean, or peel away. What results is not a gallery imposed over a restaurant, but a spatial entanglement, where ceramic tile, granite countertops, and wood-panel booths persist—reframed, but not silenced.
Horizontal view looking back toward the kitchen through a narrow opening. Image credit: James Florio
View facing the exterior, showing the layered coexistence of the existing dropped ceiling, hanging system, and the newly added plane. Image credit: James Florio
The gallery is articulated through a series of partial enclosures—floor, wall, and ceiling planes that refuse to fully converge. These elements suspend slightly above or drift away from the existing shell, producing thresholds rather than boundaries. In the interstice between insertion and artifact, a dialogue unfolds: not seamless, but precisely calibrated. The gallery operates less as container than as medium—registering material histories while opening new spatial logics.
One of the exhibition mandates required that existing benches remain unaltered, generating an architectural response of grafting. Image credit: James Florio
Above, a skeletal ceiling frame hangs in deferral, never completing the enclosure. Below, white canvas stretches taut across a structural grid of repeated studs and steel—part scaffold, part diagram. Over two hundred components assemble a kind of spatial ledger, indexing both what is present and what is withheld. The installation is temporary, but temporality here is not framed as absence—it is the condition through which continuity with the past is both acknowledged and critically staged.
Three conceptual threads organize the work. First, the fractured box: not a volume, but a dispersed set of operations—hovering, misaligning, refusing closure. Visitors move through rather than into, guided by slippage and interruption. Construction is made explicit—clamps, nails, cables, hooks—an infrastructure of visibility. Second, the project operates as a viewing apparatus. Some frames fold inward, reflecting on their own geometry; others extend outward, opening onto the street. Structure becomes optic, instrumentalizing perspective. And third, detail is treated not as embellishment, but as conceptual device. A table, a bench, a ceiling—each reconsidered through acts of recontextualization, grafting, and suspension. These “Minuscules” are less objects than inquiries: small moves with outsized implications.
View from the newly defined “back-of-house” looking out toward pedestrians and a soon-to-open public park. Image credit: James Florio
From the exterior, the project registers as little more than a reclaimed storefront. But within, it discloses a denser syntax—an architecture of adjustment and deferral. Between the latent smells of its past and the taut surfaces of its present, something else emerges: neither neutral nor nostalgic, but persistently unresolved. It is not a conversion that demands attention, but one that asks for it—quiet, analytical, and deliberately incomplete.
As the installation layers itself to form an exhibition space, it also responds to existing architectural elements—most notably, the pizza oven. Image credit: James Florio
Beyond being read as an object, the project also blends experientially into its surroundings as a corner-lot intervention. Image credit: James Florio
Credits
The project team is led by Alex Yueyan Li, Mahsa Malek, and Gabriel Herrada, with graphic design by Scott Vander Zee and photography by James Florio. Thanks also to members of the production team—Samantha Guerra, Jonah Williams, Tuul Batgerel, Myles Valintis, and Nicolas Villanueva—for their valuable contributions. We extend special thanks to Ellen Bruss, Darrin Alfred, Jane Burke, and Andre Takacs for their generous support. This project was made possible with the assistance of The Architectural League of New York, Continuum Partners, the University of Colorado Denver, and the Denver Art Museum.