Over The Influence Gallery

Located in the Arts District of Los Angeles, Over the Influence transforms a 1930s bowstring truss warehouse into a museum-quality gallery for street and urban artists. In adapting a 6,000-square-foot structure to meet the technical demands of contemporary exhibition while preserving its inherent character, AUX Architecture demonstrates our approach to adaptive reuse. The design entailed rigorous planning, restrained yet durable interventions, and a deep respect for both existing industrial fabric and contemporary artistic practice.

The gallery is organized as a clear sequence of five distinct exhibition spaces, allowing visitors to circulate fluidly between spaces. Over the Influence shows major national and international artists, including Barbara Kruger, Shepard Fairey, Ron Arad, Nobuyoshi Araki, Invader, and Alice Lang, among others. As such, each gallery is calibrated to support a wide range of artistic media. Throughout, the architecture is deliberately restrained, prioritizing function and flexibility. In contrast to the typical white cube gallery, our design positions the existing building itself in conversation with the changing artwork. Exposed brick, bowstring trusses, and concrete floors play against crisp gallery surfaces, allowing the patina of the original warehouse to remain present without competing for attention. This dialogue between old and new is achieved through precise control of proportion, material selection, and sequence.

Intuitive circulation. Each of the five spaces are designed to complement a wide variety of mediums on display. These galleries compress and expand to create spaces of slightly differing scales, and are designed to use alternating lighting sources: daylight, artificial light, and a combination of both. A fully enclosed dark gallery supports video and light-sensitive work, and a loop of interconnected daylit spaces designed to accommodate large-scale installations. Structural and detailing strategies ensure that walls can accept substantial loads—from conventional canvases to objects as heavy as a car. The result is a series of galleries with individual characteristics for a diverse array of artists.