"You can go anywhere from anywhere." - Anni Albers
Thread is a unique place where art, culture, and architecture are supported alongside agriculture, education, and health. It has hosted hundreds of local and international artists and helped foster the Sinthian Women's Farming Collective.
The imaginative building, designed pro-bono by Toshiko Mori Architect and built by local contractors, was created for its community in specific ways: the roof collects and retains rainwater, creating an additional water source for the village and enabling small-scale, year-round agriculture. Its gardens were the first site used by the Sinthian Women's Farming Collective before they expanded, and are now used by our agricultural team for teaching and testing crops. A local beekeeping collective also uses Thread as a production facility; the honey is bottled on site and sold in local markets.
Besides being an uplifting space in which artists work on their own projects, it also serves the local population as a base for language and health classes, markets, parties, music performances, sports and more. Local teachers use its printer so as not to have write out all their exams by hand; children use its library for study halls or they draw in the art corner; friends chat with one another while charging their cell phones; thousands of people pass through it during the regional soccer tournament held on the field just across from Thread.
Thread's name honors Anni Albers, who, at age twenty-two, was instructed, by the great artist Paul Klee, “to take a line for a walk”; she decided to take thread wherever it might go. Anni said that this led her to realize that “you can go anywhere from anywhere,” and since Thread opened in 2015, it has been doing exactly that.
Thread has won an AIA National Honors award, was short-listed for the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, selected for the 2014 Venice Biennale, won two Architizer awards, and was named as one of the best buildings and projects of 2015 by many notable journals, including Architectural Record, WIRED Magazine, among others.