New York-based Wolfgang & Hite’s design for an office space consolidates workspace for five separate companies within a retrofitted theater on Bleecker Street for their return to hybrid work. The lower level of this office houses premier editing suites and office space for state of the art post-production company Assembly. The design escorts the visitor to a different era, where the latest production technology finds a home in a series of client-oriented color editing suites inspired by 70’s neo-futuristic influences. The high-end acoustical detailing of the four suites is resolved in unique spatial configurations of telescoping, vividly colored wrapped wool sound panels, which pose against a backdrop of regionally-sourced walnut paneling and intricate woodworking details. This unique new home for Assembly sets the stage for their redefinition of the post-production experience–to transcend and reinvent current trends in the industry.

Role: Design and Build

Client: Assembly

Metalwork: Rustbelt Rebirth

Photos: ©ImagenSubliminal (Miguel de Guzman+Rocio Romero)

New York, NY

2022

Wish ATL, created by designers Benfield Partners and Wolfgang & Hite, took inspiration from Wish’s fifteen years of creative culture and energy. The design experiments with the concept of the remix, sampling known quantities, and rethinking their purpose and experience. Typically ceiling-mounted, building ductwork is flipped from ceiling to floor to serve as an absurd system creating colorful and plush outputs that house curated apparel and accessories. A blue carpet runway winds through the space, leading customers along custom-designed steel hanging racks. Fifty-five thousand colored shoelaces are extruded from a perforated metal wall creating the impression of broadcast television static noise. The store’s main walls are wrapped in custom wall graphics created by Atlanta-based artist Sage Guillory who has also been featured at the sister Wish Gallery, which regularly hosts exhibitions and artist collaborations. The removable wall panels invite future collaborations with artists. The new design also remixes Wish’s iconic shoe library as a staircase. Black spines surround the new stairs entry, with the books’ inner faces tunneling 10,000 books deep into the lower level of the former Carnegie library building. Inset clay dioramas of a shoe design studio and production factory by artist Cindy Hsu peek out from inside the stacks. Like a hidden door to a concealed vault, the stairs exit onto Wish’s sneaker rooms. Premium sneakers are housed within gold-leafed shoe vaults mounted on the exposed original granite foundations of the building. Ten tons of sandstone boulders from a local quarry have been hand-carved into seating for shoe fitting. The walls are lined with a custom fabricated steel matrix that houses individual shoes in cubbies that reference bank deposit boxes. Wish Remix is the culmination of everything Wishes brought to the Atlanta streetwear scene since its opening. By transforming from a shoe store to an immersive art environment, the 2020 reopening will offer a radical remix for a constantly-changing scene.

Role: Architectural Designer, Specialty Fabrication and Installation

Design Partner: Benfield Partners

Client: Wish Atlanta Boutique

Photos: ©Johnny Fogg

Atlanta, Georgia

2020

Harmony Cannabis

For this location our client asked us to create a store unlike any other in the emerging cannabis market. This store’s location at the base of the H Towers at Ha’Arba street looks out onto the wide pedestrian plaza Piazza Givon. From the exterior, the display’s bright blue lines creates a full height parallax effect visible through the building’s tinted glass façade. This display also holds a curated set of high end pharmacy and cannabis products while framing the interior space and guiding a store flow that flexibly adapts to queues. A double height wall of hempcrete fiber blocks runs the length of the store, creating a deep backdrop into which wooden display shelves are carved. The floor is a combination of handset marble terrazzo and flowing concrete. CNC’ed shelving is custom fit to the negative space of the curves.

Photos: ©Aviv Pressburger

2022

Shan and Greta helped our clients open a hybrid cafe in Dumbo. Named after the famous Latin Quarter in Goa, India, the eponymous Fontainhas is half wine-bar-cafe and half market. Located a block from the river near Brooklyn Bridge Park, it's one of a kind in the neighborhood, combining traditional Indian cuisine, aromatic chais, and a selection of organic wines. 

Wolfgang & Hite paid homage to DUMBO's maritime history using oysters and tabby concrete as inspiration, with oyster shells as the inlay aggregate within the concrete feature bar counter. The use of natural materials is central to the design, with warm terracotta and light live-edge maple balancing the space's industrial feel. The atmosphere is further enlivened by the owner’s personal collection of brightly patterned cushions, printed chairs, artist books, and rare vinyl records, which reflect their eclectic and vibrant spirits.

Role: Furniture Design, Specialty Fabrication, Furniture and Installation

Client: Fontainhas

Photos: ©ImagenSubliminal

(Miguel de Guzman+Rocio Romero)

DUMBO, Brooklyn, New York

2024

Wolfgang and Hite collaborated with the artist duo Freeman and Lowe in the completion their most ambitious installation to date, A Cell in the Smile. The work, constructed in collaboration with local Ohio builders, consisted of a 6,000 square foot underground bunker housing a labyrinth of rooms, each with a highly specific aesthetic and identity. From the bulkhead entrance and down a set of stairs, is a mahogany paneled room with coffered ceiling. Two life-size dioramas with scenically painted backdrops and three large scale vitrines represent a 19th century style Natural History Museum complete with taxidermy and preserved natural fauna. Nearby, a triangulated lit mirrored ceiling reflects the room below. From here the rooms continue: a computer room filled with machinery and dials, a storage room hid behind a vintage soda machine, a 1950s-style office, a spiral staircase to a mosaic tile den with a backlit fabric ceiling, and finally a theater space designed with vintage airline chairs and anechoic chamber foam. A two-hundred-foot tunnel leads you outside to a deck with a forest view. 

Role: Design, Planning, Interior Construction, Fabrication, Project Management

Architect of Record: Sebastian Quinn Building Workshop

General Contractor: Brookes & Henderson Building Co., LLC

Interior Contractor: RC Construction

Client: Marlborough Gallery

Photos: Christian Hansen, Jerry Birchfield, Ivan Huang

Chagrin Falls, Ohio

2018

The Tioronda Experience is the intersection of nature and hospitality. Located in Beacon, New York, Tioronda is a short drive from Beacon’s Main Street as well as the Dia Beacon. The site is 66 acres of forested land overlooking Fishkill Creek, which flows into the Hudson River nearby. The name itself is an Iroquois word that translates roughly as “small stream that runs into big water”.

In 1859 the site became home to civil war general Joseph Howland who built a neogothic mansion that is now the anchor of the Tioronda Site.

Renamed the Craig House in 1915, the building became a sanitarium and home to patients such as Zelda Fitzergerlad who convalesced there in the 1930s.

A modern addition to the house was built in the 1970s before the institution closed in 1999. Locals know the Craig House best for its storied history as a mental institution. This project seeks to preserve the building and its history while expanding the focus of the Tioronda site. This masterplan describes a future for Tioronda which brings together many elements through the natural beauty of the place.

This proposal restores the original 19th century estate to a modern hotel. In excellent condition, the main neogothic structure is a natural entry point for a hospitality experience which includes not only the historic rooms of the house itself. This plan makes use of the larger 1970s annex to the Craig House with a design that compliment the richness of the older structure with modern detailing.

The natural slope of the land becomes an opportunity to add to the guest experience with unique freestanding treehouse guest rooms, each with a private view through the trees towards Fillkill Creek beyond.

A nordic inspired spa cascades through the sloped portion of the site which overlooks of the most breathraking view of the creek and its waterfalls and brings visitor’s through interior and exterior spaces that wind through nature.

Farm-to-table fields and orchards work synergistically with a hotel restaurant as well as a cidery located in co-working facility with a separate entry to the south off Grandview Avenue. This area is also home to a Conference Center planned to accommodate large events and programming.

A music studios and residency program inhabits one of the smaller historic brick structures, also off of Grandview Avenue, allowing Tioronda to host small performances for hotel guests and visitors. A proposal to exhibit art in an existing wooden structure near the hotel’s entry connects Tioronda with Beacon’s already thriving art tourism and identity as an upstate cultural hub.

Walking and biking paths wind through Tioronda’s wooded slopes and grass fields, connecting each proposed area to Tioronda’s root experience in nature.

Co-designed with AB Architekten

This ambitious project was originally intended to transform an industrial block of Jersey City. Harmony Dispensary hired Wolfgang & Hite to design a large campus with drive-through pickups, classes, laboratories, co-working spaces, an outdoor lounge, a brewery, recording studios, and a 10,000-square foot sales floor showcasing their most recent cannabis grow. 

The project kicked off with the Jersey City Mural Festival with Mana Contemporary and Wolfgang & Hite curating the three muralists–Max Sansing, Dasic Fernandez, and Eric Karbeling–to transform three facades of a former shipping headquarters.

For the interiors of this space a smaller mural would greet you at the host check-in with a meandering path leading you on to the dispensary’s sales floor. A ceiling hung with hundreds of controllable spherical pendant lamps mirror (stalagtite-style) a display of custom resin orbs. Each solid resin orb encapsulates the adult flowers of the most recent and popular strains. The selection would be brought to the register where one would encounter a 40 foot wide smoke wall with curls and vortexes of color and smoke. On your exit you would enter the gift shop, a pearlescent undulation of soft wavy walls that showcase accessories and other paraphernalia to complete your trip.

Role: Design and Build

Client: Harmony

Photos: ©ImagenSubliminal (Miguel de Guzman+Rocio Romero)

Jersey City, NJ

2022

Wolfgang & Hite was hired to explore a concept design for a 3,600-square-foot cannabis dispensary, and we used the nearly-unusable existing glass storefront projection to explore the streetfront captivation–doubling as a legally required privacy screen.

We reimagined the narrow corridor and adjoining spaces of the existing interiors as a series of train boxcars, each one different from the next. The main recreational sales area was a walnut-clad nod to Victorian train interiors, and a sci-fi-inspired narrow gallery showcase led upstairs to a 1960s-dining-car sales room and downstairs to a medical sales area inspired by the greenhouse traincar from the movie Snowpiercer. The space itself was designed to be a trip.

Role: Design and Build

2022-Ongoing

North Six Offices

New York-based Wolfgang & Hite’s design for an office space consolidates workspace for five separate companies within a retrofitted theater on Bleecker Street for their return to hybrid work. Large scale graphics connect the complex program while monumental design elements emphasize the scale of the double-height space of the stage to elevate the offices of the global creative production agency North Six and its affiliated businesses in New York.

A silver paint pattern wraps the space three-dimensionally, enclosing the viewer as if in an expanding Andy Warhol mylar balloon that lifts the eye in appreciation of the room’s volume. Vertical elements also accentuate the height. A custom nine-globe light fixture lowers a 16-foot mirrored plane above a massive poured concrete communal work table. An 19-foot high thin steel lattice reaches to the ceiling, levitating a multilayered colored concrete monolith at eye level where the office identities are displayed at the entry.

The wall patterns fold into a two-tone diagram in thin-set concrete micro-topping on the floor, with radiused pathways that separate communal tables and workstations on the ground floor while acting as wayfinding to the upper and lower floors. One tributary leads up the stairs to office mezzanines and two others spill down to the lower level below where the patterns continue in large format custom shapes of warm whites and golds.

Role: Design and Build

Client: North Six

Metalwork: Rustbelt Rebirth

Photos: ©ImagenSubliminal (Miguel de Guzman+Rocio Romero)

New York, NY

2022

Our future office takes what we learned from COVID-19 and looks to the next urgent crisis of rising global temperatures. As the outside world becomes more and more inhospitable to humans, spaces will have to better manage rising temperatures while balancing the changing demands of workers. We’ve retooled a prototypical existing New York mid-rise office building by carving exterior space into the facade, defining the interiors with organic acoustic materials, and bringing rain-captured thermal water mass to slow heat loss and reduce energy consumption. For further energy savings, the “business casual” of inhabitants within becomes shorts and tank tops. A non-hierarchical office plan is augmented by “zoom pods” that allow individuals to enter acoustically and visually isolated environments within an open format. These pods can also be sleep pods for napping, spontaneous acoustic meeting rooms, and dinner parties so that the workplace can accommodate more of life’s activities than work alone.

Featured in Surface Mag:

“The Future of Work Might Look Like This,” by Gabrielle Golenda February 17, 2021

Yadastar is a branding and consulting agency that organizes and produces music events around the world, including the Red Bull Music Academy. Wolfgang & Hite, in collaboration with Teresa Herrmann from Good Grades, designed a new office space for their New York outfit in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Clean slat-wall partitions were designed to streamline the raw warehouse space and divide conference and kitchen spaces. A private meeting area was completed with a custom wood-worked interior and custom offset pivot door entry set into a stained reclaimed wood exterior. Furniture was selected for the 12-person team that would cater to their working habits and future workspaces.

Role: Interior Design, Interior Construction

Collaborators: Teresa Herrmann, Production, Interiors

Client: Yadastar

Brooklyn, NY

2016

This project converts the Harlem School of the Arts brutalist-style facility into a welcoming and vibrant community hub, accomplishing an essential tenet of the institution’s mission: interaction and exchange through the arts. The brick exterior is replaced with a glass facade, creating connecting views between the interior and courtyard garden and the street. The lobby is transformed into a high-tech gallery and performance space, a design, calibrated by John Storyk, that supports a wide range of dynamic exhibitions, performances, and events in the HSA’s hallmark double-height atrium. The new construction resolves safety and code compliance concerns of the existing facility as well as making imminent necessary repairs to the building core, including roof repairs and replacing windows through-out. Supported with generous funding and creative input by musical artist Herb Alpert.

Harlem, NY

2019

Photography by Amy Barkow

Role: Project Architect for Schematic Design and Design Development Phases for Imrey Studio, LLC.

Wolfgang & Hite, in collaboration with Benfield Partners, delivered Matthew and Emily Hyland’s newest Pizza experience with Violet. The 51-seat eatery features concrete arches, a vaulted gold ceiling, a surrounding white oak banquet, and an open kitchen with a marble bar. Gold accents the lighting elements for a warm atmosphere. 

Role: Design, Interior Construction, Fabrication, Project Management

Design Partner: Benfield Partners

Client: Pizza Loves Emily Group

Photography: Johnny Fogg

New York, NY

2018

Straylight, conceived by artists Freeman and Lowe, is a subterranean omakase-style cocktail bar, located at the basement level of Juku, a three story multi-themed restaurant in Chinatown. Wolfgang & Hite designed the layout, the details of the space, and created each surface from new and found objects, combining a sweeping range of moods, surface, and identities to create an artful cocktail bar experience. The entry hallway echoes the surrounding massage parlors of the Chinatown neighborhood with the artists’ signature slate wall following the contours of the stairway, all being blindingly lit with 6400k grow lamps. Upon entry to the lower level, the bar is clad in 20^th century oak paneling with green velvet seating. The cocktail tables are designed as patterned inlay ipe wood and crafted by artisans Edward Reno. The overheard Buminister Fuller-esque ceiling is a tessellation of patterns of oak and fabric-stretched panels. The private dining area, drawing inspiration from Danish artist Asger Jorn, is encompassed in hand-placed mosaic composed of thrift store relics and architectural salvage.

Role: Design Planning, Interior Construction

Artist: Freeman and Lowe

Client: Juku

32 Mulberry, New York, NY

2017

The Gift Shop is a concept store and programming platform that serves as an extension of the curated contemporary art program at Red Bull Studios. In collaboration, Red Bull Studios, Alldaydveryday, Tomer Bengal, Teresa Herrmann, and Wolfgang & Hite, managed the production, design development, and construction drawings as well as fabrication, production, and installation. The Gift Shop was designed to flexibly showcase featured art and design pieces synchronized with Red Bull Studios’ program at-large exhibitions, and public events. The custom steel shelves are mounted onto a wall of LED lit glass panels. A custom rolling steel trellis serves as a gateway as well as additional display space.

Role: Design Drawings, Installation, Production Management

Collaborators: Alldayeveryday, Tomer Bengal, Teresa Hermann

Client: Red Bull Studios

New York, NY

2015

POLARIS celebrates the center of the city in thousands of reflections, images, transient interactions, and memories. The term POLARIS refers to the North Star, which has historically been used for navigation, hence the centralizing of the installation to the Flatiron District, a central point of Manhattan. Hundreds of reflective orbs, like mirrors, hang reminiscent of classic holiday ornaments, lighting up at night in programmed sequences. The multiplicity within each spherical mirror represents the myriad perspectives and viewpoints of New York’s inhabitants and visitors while abstractly bending the surrounding architecture and the city. The installation footprint forms the negative space of nine intersecting spheres, which cut towards the landmarks around them. Each section faces a different view: to Madison Park, one north up 5^th Avenue, one west to Eataly and 23^rd Street, and one south to the Flatiron Building.

Role: Designer

Structural Engineer: Geoffrey Brunn

Structural Systems- Flexpipe Inc.

Metal Fabrication Consultant: Rustbelt Rebirth

2018

FORMAT FESTIVAL - NOVA HEAT

NOVA HEAT is a multi-roomed immersive installation and structure from the collaborative duo Freeman and Lowe. The speakeasy-cum-installation-cum-venue is crowned with a planetarium at its center. A series of porta-potties disguise the entrance to a room wrapped with copper sheeting whose central wall is inlaid with a 200 sqft custom-glazed ceramic artwork. The copper room is one corner of a pentagon that surrounds a central space. Galleries to the right and left are draped in backlit velvet tapestries and print and ephemera collage and lead to slat-walled bars and additional porta-pottied entrances. In the center, a 40-foot dome houses the artists’ video work projection-mapped onto the surface of the dome, becoming a backdrop for the various performances in the space over the course of the festival.

Role: Project Management, Installation Coordination, Fabricator, Design Consultant

Artist: Freeman and Lowe

Client: Format Festival

Lighting: Headline Productions

Technician: Sven Dumelie

Photography: Ismael Quintanilla, Jonah Freeman

Bentonville Arkansas

2022

Brookfield Luminaries is an annual interactive light installation, composed of over 600 RPG-glowing pendants. Hanging from a suspended structure in a 60-foot high atrium, the design considers the growth of 16 palm trees existing in the space over the course of the 10-year installation. The ambient light of the pendants transition color and a series of touch-operated glowing pedestals activate the creation of lit “wishes” directly above participants.

Role: Project Architect, Greta Hansen

Design by: Rockwell Group

New York, NY

2015

This seminal work by the artists Freeman and Lowe was first shown at Art Basel Unlimited in 2013. In 2016, Wolfgang & Hite worked with the artists to reconfigure the large-scale installation into an interconnecting, thirteen-room, multi-story permanent exhibit at the Philara Collection in Dusseldorf. The Artichoke Underground explores the narrative of an eponymous fictitious of seemingly disparate interiors, including a Punjabi kitchen, a waiting room, a walk-in refrigerated room, and an incubator for the study of plant consciousness – all part of the disorienting maze of schemes surrounding the Artichoke Underground’s print shop. 

Role: Project Management, Installation Coordination

Artist: Freeman and Lowe

Client: Philara Collection

Dusseldorf, Germany

2016

SCENARIO IN THE SHADE: COPENHAGEN

Role: Project Management, Installation Coordination

Artist: Freeman and Lowe

Client: Kusthal Charlottenborg

Copenhagen, Denmark

2018

COLONY SOUND is the latest work from the collaborative duo Freeman and Lowe. This ambitious project spans eleven rooms over two floors of exhibition space, obscuring the existing gallery and its architecture in its entirety. Wolfgang & Hite fabricated the installation in New York and later deinstalled and reinstalled in the London gallery. Each of the eleven rooms is composed of unique elements that range from a telecommunication retail outlet, twin operating theater, an electromagnetic wave shielded copper room, an incinerated recording studio, a sunken lounge composed of handmade ceramic, a geodesic dome, and an office space ravaged by time. 

Role: Project Management, Installation Coordination, Fabricator, Design Consultant

Artist: Freeman and Lowe

Client: Marlborough Fine Art

Millwork: Manu Fortis Fabrications

Metal Work: Rustbelt Rebirth

Technician: Sven Dumelie

Photography: Luke Walker

Mayfair, London

2019

The ARoS museum in Aarhus Denmark opened COLONY SOUND the latest work from the collaborative duo Freeman and Lowe. This exhibition is a maze of 15 rooms over the main exhibition floor of the museum obscuring the existing gallery and its architecture in its entirety. Wolfgang & Hite fabricated the installation for the exhibition’s premiere at their London gallery and expanded these elements and added more spaces for this exhibition.

Role: Project Management, Installation Coordination, Fabricator, Design Consultant

Artist: Freeman and Lowe

Client: ARoS Museum

Millwork: Manu Fortis Fabrications

Metal Work: Rustbelt Rebirth

Technician: Sven Dumelie

Photography: Ander Sune Berg

Aarhus, Denmark

2020

Spaced Out: Migration to the Interior was a two-story art exhibit showing work from 35 artists, curated by Phong Bui and the Brooklyn Rail. Wolfgang & Hite coordinated with Bui to transform the 20,000 square foot space into a visual kaleidoscope of psychedelic art which includes large-scale sculptural work, multimedia installations, paintings, and small delicate pieces. Wolfgang & Hite managed the interiors, including construction of a fully carpeted basement space and temporary gallery spaces, and transportation and install.

Role: Exhibition Coordination, Interior Construction

Curator: Phong Bui + Brooklyn Rail Editions

Client: Red Bull Studios

New York, NY

2015

Paranoia Man in a Rat Fink Room is a Freeman and Lowe work commissioned by the New York Comedy Festival and exhibited at the Storefront for Art and Architecture. Wolfgang & Hite produced the four-element exhibition: the “Coming Soon” street shed, the Jungle Video store, Stacy’s bathroom and the titular Rat Fink Room. Styled after the original Jackie Cannon comedy cellar, the Rat Fink Room was designed from comedy folklore as there are no existing photos of the original club. Oak paneled walls, a tiled mirrored ceiling, vintage light fixtures and brightly colored furniture were aged to match the smoky environs of the 1960’s. The bathroom was composed of found objects: antique wallpaper, salvaged bathroom tile, hardware and fixtures, and secondhand toiletries. The Jungle Video store and the Street Shed are that like the Storefront for Art and Architecture is to the contemporary landscape of the neighborhood, telling a story of the small vendor hawking DVDs and the mega cosmetic industries taking over mom and pop retail.

Role: Exhibition Coordination, Interior Construction

Artist: Freeman and Lowe

Client: New York Comedy Festival

Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York, NY

2016

Wolfgang & Hite designed and fabricate a customizable cocktail container to elevate the presentation of a Red Bull based cocktail. Carved from solid walnut, the box, when opened, reveals a negative space puzzle of custom-CNC-routed slots and storage spaces for cocktail components. Inspiration was drawn from the ordered interiors of the Bento box, whose ingredients can be mixed and matched for a limitless play on the full experience.

Role: Design, Production

Client: Red Bull North America

Photography: Johnny Fogg

2016