3 P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center Long Island City, New York: A Turn-of-the-Century School Yields a Vibrant, Energetic Exhibition Space That Blurs the Line Between Building and Art.

Photograph

Photograph: The former schoolyard was converted to an outdoor gallery, with floors of crushed gravel and concrete walls. Visitors wend their way to the entrance by passing through these outdoor rooms.

PHOTOGRAPHY: Copyright MICHAEL MORAN

Project: P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York

Owner: City of New York; New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, sponsoring agency; New York City Department of Design and Construc-tion, contracting agency

Architect: Frederick Fisher+Partners--Frederick Fisher, principal-in-charge, Joseph Coriaty, partner-in-charge

Architect of Record: David Prender-gast, principal; Deborah Laurel, project architect; Jeffrey Magella, Dan Hill, Scott Weinkle, project team

Engineers: Mariano Molina (mechanical and electrical); Robert Silman Associates (structural)

Consultants: Signe Nielsen, P.C. Landscape Architecture (landscaping); Randy Sabedra (lighting); Reginald Hough (concrete)

General Contractor: Foundation Construction Consultants

Size: 125,000 square feet, including exterior sculpture rooms

Cost: $8.5 million

As the elevated subway screeches around the last curve into the Court House Square station in Long Island City, Queens, the P.S.1 Contempo-rary Art Center announces itself in the distance in bold, three-story-high letters painted on one of its faded brick walls. The sign is em-blematic of P.S.1's new commitment to welcoming the general public.

When P.S.1 opened in 1976 in an abandoned turn-of-the-century elementary school, it provided a permanent home for a peripatetic museum, the Institute for Art and Urban Resources, founded in 1971. The organization was a product of the late Brendan Gill, the former architecture critic at the New Yorker, and Alanna Heiss, a leader in the alternative space movement, whose aim was to eliminate the elitism of the art establishment by deinstitutionalizing art.

In P.S.1's inaugural exhibition, ``Rooms,'' for example, dozens of artists filled the dilapidated building with art. They painted on blackboards and brick, tore into walls and floors, and showed that an exhibition environment need not be precious and can itself lend meaning to art.

In the years following, P.S.1 mounted more traditional exhibitions in its formal galleries, a series of classrooms renovated by artist Robert Ryman and connected by simple doorways. Visiting artists worked in on-site studios, keeping the process of making art close by. But while P.S.1 succeeded in showing a broad range of controversial work that might have been ignored by other galleries, it did not attract a broad audience....