COURTESY TRIPLE CANOPY AND LEONG LEONG
The nonprofit digital arts magazine Triple Canopy will relocate its New York headquarters this fall to Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood. The new space will be located at 264 Canal Street, between Broadway and Lafayette Street. They will be vacating their current space in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint, which they currently share with film venue Light Industry. The new space will double their current square-footage.
“We saw this as a great opportunity to think about our editorial process and the ways in which the Greenpoint space worked for it and the ways in which it didn’t,” Triple Canopy associate editor Emily Wang said in a phone interview.
The new space was designed by Leong Leong. The press release announcing the move noted that the Canal Street space will not be an open-plan space, unlike most publishing offices these days. “We have very private, intensive work that needs to be done—intensive nitty gritty editing,” Wang explained.“We also have collaborative work, so we needed to have a much more flexible workspace.”
Deputy editor Molly Kleiman added, “An open-plan space is often seen as a metaphor for being transparent and open, but soft furniture, glass walls, no wall dividers don’t necessarily translate to a healthy work environment. We often have close, considered reading and editing time and that work can only be done without any visual or physical distractions. We needed more monkish environments.”
The Canal Street office will also allow for a better integration of the magazine’s live events programming, which has expanded significantly in the past few years. Triple Canopy plans to inaugurate the new space with a series of events, over the span of six weeks, mainly involving conversations between one of the magazine’s editors and one of its contributors.
Founded in 2007 by a group of about 20 editors, designers, and technologists, Triple Canopy released its first issue in 2008. Triple Canopy’s director Peter J. Russo once described the organization to me “as a venue for artists who want to write and writers who want to make art.”