When the artist Jorge Pardo decided to move his studio from Los Angeles to the Yucatán nine years ago, it made sense to transfer his American home base east to New York. The city was a short hop from Cancún and a place where he could easily connect with galleries and visit his daughter, Penelope, who had recently relocated there. Looking to imprint his original and exuberantly colored vision, he landed on an early 1900s carriage house nestled between a low-rise apartment building and a garage in Bushwick, a Brooklyn neighborhood that has so far resisted full-scale gentrification.
“I’m an immigrant, and this was an immigrant community I really liked,” says Pardo, a Cuban American who grew up in Chicago from the age of six. “It’s Latin, with people selling food on the street and little cell-phone-fixing stores,” not to mention a Popeyes chicken, his beloved Starbucks, and the L train close at hand. It reminds him, he says, of East L.A., where he lived happily for many years after enrolling at Art Center College of Design in the ’80s.
A small, narrow building, 15 feet by 70, the house had previously been gutted by a developer whose plans fell through, making it ideal for Pardo. “I like open spaces and really simple things,” he says, “and it felt like a loft, with high ceilings on both floors.” He switched out the original carriage-house doors for a conventional garage (handy for stowing his car when he travels) and replaced the rear façade with window walls, flooding the house’s open living space with light. At its center, Pardo installed a well-equipped kitchen and dining area—he loves to cook and entertain friends. A new scarlet spiral staircase at the back of the room offers a sculptural counterpoint to the predominantly blue and green floor tiles.
Pardo’s bedroom, one of three on the second level, is simply furnished with Ikea shelving
units and Linoto linens.
Outside, a back garden functions as an inner courtyard, planted with small indigenous trees by the landscape designer Liz Campbell Kelly. “We put in a 12-foot wall, the same height as the ceiling, so that it feels like a room back there, but open to the sky,” says Pardo. “I like that Latin American thing where you don’t have a front yard. When you go into your house, you enter your own world.”
And Pardo’s is quite a world, characterized by his signature gestures of extensive tilework in vibrant colors and clusters of his intricate, low-hanging lamps. From his studio in Mérida, where his 13-person team includes carpenters, painters, and architects, he operates in a way that is almost the inverse of most artistic practice: For him, the computer is a means of creative freedom, and because everything is digitally fabricated in-house, he can make numerous prototypes in quick succession to try out his ideas before finalizing and hand-finishing a piece. “There’s a nice agility to the process,” Pardo says.
The artist and his painting in the living area.
Pardo replaced the existing staircase with a spiral design in scarlet; the walls are painted in a hand-mixed combination of Behr colors.
An outstanding colorist, he works in terms of palettes, juggling as many as 40 colors in his tile pieces and lamps and mixing shapes and surfaces, whether glossy or matte, to find exciting, often unexpected relationships. “It’s all intuitive,” he says, “but it’s hard to get to.” When he does, he adds with a laugh, “You think, Oh, that’s it! And the monkey hits the drum!”
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January 15, 2021 at 08:07PM
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Artist Jorge Pardo Transforms his Bushwick Carriage House into a Livable Piece of Art - Architectural Digest
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