Rugs Made of Ruins: Lucas Cantu's Laberintos Fills a Brooklyn Bank Vault

Four hand-knotted rugs inspired by the stone grids of Tenochtitlan are now on view inside a century-old bank vault at Brooklyn's landmarked Dime Savings Bank, and the vault's cracked marble is staying exactly as it is. Susan Clark, founder of nomadic gallery Radnor and its offshoot Radnor Made, declined the developer's offer to make repairs before the show opened. Her aim, she said, was to amplify the rawness of the setting.

The collection, called Laberintos — Spanish for 'labyrinth' or 'maze' — comes from Mexico City-based artist and architect Lucas Cantu, who runs the multidisciplinary design studio Tezontle. He drew on Pre-Columbian stone construction, specifically the urban imprint of Tenochtitlan, capital of the Aztec empire. The results read like line drawings of millennia-old stone walls viewed from above.

Why a bank vault?

The Dime Savings Bank, a Beaux-Arts landmark with a 40-foot-tall central rotunda and Corinthian columns encircling a bronze clock, now forms the base of the borough's first and only supertall skyscraper. The vault shuttered a decade ago and shows it: cracks run through the fluted marble panels, chips mark the plaster reliefs lining the coffered ceilings.

Clark saw the fit immediately. The architecture and the rugs share what she calls a perceptible sense of weighty history and well-worn materiality — evidence of long, loving use.

'Lucas has been obsessed with ruins since childhood,' Clark said. 'As a kid, he spent hours drawing mazes and these rug designs are drafted extrapolations of those labyrinthic compositions. They depict how rooms intersect in these dense cities; how one often cuts through narrow passageways to get to wider streets.'

Cantu frames the work in similar terms. 'Archaeological sites are fragments of what once was; the missing pieces are left to our imagination,' he said. 'In their incompleteness, they become almost abstract forms that invite new ways of seeing.'

How the rugs are made

The four numbered designs use hand-knotted Tibetan wool as the ground, with cut pile Chinese silk layered on top. The silk's tonal shift and luminescence echoes the gilded motifs topping the bank's columns — one concrete comparison the room makes without any help from a curator. Each rug carries a sculptural quality, displayed from both sides in the vault, and the palette sticks to earth tones: creme, olive and taupe.

Production ran through GoodWeave guild artisans in Nepal. Some compositions are more zoomed out and impressionistic than others, but all of them interplay 2D pattern with 3D topographical representation.

What's the so-what?

Major fashion houses have asked to stage events at the bank, according to the gallery, but Clark is the first to show in the 100,000 sq ft bank portion. She also maintains a temporary showroom in a penthouse on the 92nd floor of the adjacent SHoP-designed tower. Silverstein Properties developed both buildings.

Laberintos joins a raft of pictorial carpets treating the floor — a room's fifth wall — as another surface for art. Compared with other recent capsule collections, Cantu's contribution leans less on whimsy or nostalgia. The rugs anchor the space instead, hinting at what might have stood on the same ground centuries, even millennia, before.

Laberintos is on view by appointment through 31 December at 9 DeKalb Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11201.

By Amara Osei