The International Center of Photography Merges its Museum and School in One Hip Locale

The firm was tasked with combining the ICP School, also by Gensler, and the ICP Museum—two separate spaces in different neighborhoods—into one hub with both downtown edge and 21st-century polish. The team transformed several floors of two interconnected buildings at Essex Crossing, a Lower East Side mixed-use development built in 2018 by SHoP Architects that spans half a city block, into a 40,000-square-foot center housing a café and store on the ground level, galleries and a library on two, and classrooms, labs, darkrooms, and a student lounge above.

ICP has two entrances, one on Ludlow Street, the other on Essex. The latter is the main one, and it features a loftlike stairwell that provides access to both the museum and the school. “The stairwell connects it all together,” Gensler principal and design director Mark Morton says, further noting the visibility of the neighborhood’s historic tenement buildings through a wall of glass as visitors and students make their descent.

The two entities also share a cohesive, industrial palette—gray poured concrete floors, white walls, blackened-steel finishes, exposed pipes and columns.

Past the lobby, where paneling of Baltic birch-plywood lends warmth to the urban surrounds, the stair leads up to the second-floor library, itself a work of art—two stories and fitted with extensive built-in stacks and state-of-the-art AV equipment. “A lot of our planning studies centered around making the library an important space for lectures,” Morton adds.