Los Angeles-based architects Marcelo Spina and Georgina Huljich of architectural practice Patterns have completed an art gallery on Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles.

Called PRISM, the project is a three-storey gallery space designed to showcase work by new artists.

The building incorporates exhibition space, film-viewing and lecture areas, and a bookshop.

The facade is made of a polycarbonate resin-based composite, which creates a reflective surface during the day and becomes transluscent at night, lit from within.

Strips of this material wrap around the building, peeling away to create openings for the foyer and to light the internal spaces.

Photographs are by Joshua White.

Here's some text from the designer:

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Based on a radical geometric contextualism, our concept for the 8746 Sunset Blvd attempts to produce an architecture of subtle sensations by inducing a physical and optical dynamism that both challenge and enhance the movement of the body.

The formal logic of the facade is the outcome of a productive negotiation between geometric operations governed by the column grid of the existing building and driven by spatial conditions allowed by the singularity of the adjacent context.

The spatial performance of the store is based on the bending effect of two reciprocally ruled surfaces: the facade that bends inside up and the pliant stair that bends outside down, create a magnetic field that gravitates towards the interior.

The bent facade operates as a responsive skin that by means of local inflections senses the dynamics of pedestrian activity on the sidewalk and nearby strip. The interior bent surface fluidly shreds into steps allowing the emergence of a differential hybrid that operates as a stair and display system at the same time.

PRISM’s inaugural exhibition, “mindthegap,” will feature artists Phil Frost and Barry McGee, and will be open to the public from Nov.20-Feb.20