THE RYDER

The Ryder is a project that transforms a former jamón-curing facility into the new home of The Ryder Projects gallery.

The existing premises preserve, as a latent inheritance, their original use: a space once used for curing ham. This past is not treated as an anecdote or as a decorative motif, but as an infrastructure that remains active: a ceiling-hung system made up of small metal hooks from which these pieces once hung. The project takes this material remnant as the key to understanding the place and its transformation: the space had already been conceived to support and suspend, to organise air, weight and distance. In a sense, the gallery does not introduce an ex novo gesture, but rather shifts the regime of an existing logic.

The intervention recognises this infrastructural layer and reconverts it into a support system for hanging works of art. The hooks, and the order they draw across the ceiling, are read as an operative grid: a support plane that allows works to be hung, adjusted, moved and installed. The services required for the contemporary functioning of the gallery, particularly electricity and lighting, are incorporated into this same layer.

The new elements developed to provide access, storage and auxiliary uses follow the same logic: pieces that rest on, hang from or are anchored to the existing structure, avoiding the imposition of an external order. In particular, the staircase that gives access to the basement level, the main exhibition space, is conceived as a suspended element: it hangs from the load-bearing wall and descends in cantilever, adapting to the geometry of the original opening in the existing floor slab.

A second, now technical, device is added to this genealogy of hanging, designed to facilitate the movement of large-scale works. A motorised hook, a hoist, uses the void freed by the geometry of the staircase itself as a loading space. At street level, the balustrade, apparently static, opens to allow the entry and manoeuvring of large-format works.

The project is completed with a storage area located in one of the vaulted spaces in the basement. There, a system of sliding racks is in turn suspended from the existing brick vaults: a final layer of suspension that extends the logic of the project into the logistical realm.

In this way, the gallery is constructed as an architecture of support: a space in which hanging is the principle that articulates memory, technique and use.

THE RYDER was designed and built by BURR (E.Fuertes, R.Martínez, A.Molins, J.Sobejano) in Madrid in 2025. Amanda Bouzada, Marina van der Linden, Natalia Molina and Guillermo Hernández were part of the team.  

The outcome was photographed by Maru Serrano.