Why 4 New York Museums Were Designed So Differently
From the epic halls of The Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Guggenheim, New York City is home to some of the most famous museums in the world, each one looking completely different from the next. Today Michael Wyetzner of Michielli + Wyetzner Architects returns to AD for an in-depth look at how the iconic museums and art galleries of NYC developed their unique designs and became some of the city’s best landmarks.
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00:00 museums that New York City has to offer are each designed very differently for
00:04 very different purposes. Their unique designs relate specifically to their
00:08 unique collections. From the height of abstract expressionism to one of the
00:12 largest collections in the world. Hi, I'm Michael Weitzner and I've been an
00:15 architect in New York City for over 35 years. Today we're going to break down
00:19 four of the most visited art museums in New York City and see how they're
00:22 designed for crowds, light, and art. First up, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. So the
00:30 Metropolitan Museum of Art sits on Fifth Avenue. It's five blocks long. It goes
00:35 from 80th to 85th Street, which is actually about a quarter of a mile. So
00:39 this grand museum with one of the greatest collections in the world is
00:43 essentially free as long as you're a New Yorker. And it actually sits inside
00:48 Central Park. So the museum was founded in 1872 and its original building was
00:53 built in 1880 by the same architect who designed all the buildings in Central
00:57 Park along with Frederick Law Olmsted. And that person is Calvert Vaux. So let's
01:02 take a look at his original design. This building is very typical of 1870s
01:06 architecture and that's because it has this very Victorian sort of Gothic style.
01:10 It's got this mansard roof. It's made out of red brick with these limestone sort
01:16 of base. And it's got these granite sort of details and these little flourishes.
01:21 And it all has this sort of fairy tale precious feel to it. So over the decades
01:27 the museum would be expanded greatly, but they never demolished the existing
01:32 building. They just kept growing around it. And what I love about this photo is
01:36 these two facades particularly are still visible in the museum today. Along the
01:41 south there's a sculpture court and along the west facade here they actually
01:45 added the Lehman Wing. Okay let's take a look at the first expansion by Richard
01:49 Morris Hunt. So in the 1890s the museum commissioned Richard Morris Hunt to give
01:54 it a greater presence along Fifth Avenue. Richard Morris Hunt is also known for
01:58 doing the base of the Statue of Liberty as well as the huge Biltmore Estate for
02:02 the Vanderbilt family in North Carolina. He created the fabulous Great Hall which
02:08 is what you first walk into with all those beautiful arches and domes. And he
02:12 also created that grand staircase within that brings you up to the second floor.
02:16 And it opened in 1902. He didn't want to replicate what was already there. He
02:21 wanted to create his own statement. So where Vaux and Mould used this sort of
02:27 Gothic Victorian style of architecture, Hunt uses a totally classical style,
02:33 Greek and Roman, and makes the entire building out of limestone. So that they
02:38 have a very separate feel. What's great about this shot is you can see that
02:41 there's no context. They're building in the park so they're essentially just
02:46 have nature surrounding them. There's no buildings on either side of it so the
02:50 architect didn't have to react to any of the existing architecture. He could do
02:53 exactly what he wanted and in this case it was create this grand facade for this
02:59 very important museum. And if we look at this photo you could see the original
03:03 building is sitting back here in Central Park and you could see that Richard
03:08 Morris Hunt brought the museum much closer to Fifth Avenue. And just eight
03:12 years later they were almost double the size of the existing museum with a new
03:15 expansion by McKim, Mead & White. So in 1910 the museum hired the great firm
03:21 McKim, Mead & White to put on even longer wings on either side. And this is what
03:25 makes the museum go from basically 80th Street to 85th Street along Fifth Avenue.
03:30 And what McKim, Mead & White did by adding these huge wings is they basically
03:35 kept the original building intact like Hunt and they also stayed with Hunt's
03:40 style of architecture, this sort of Beaux-Arts classical style. And these
03:44 wings are so huge now that they've essentially eliminated the park from the
03:49 context and they've created this five block long street wall. So they've in a
03:53 sense built their own context. So in just 30 years the museum has already become
04:01 this sort of behemoth and yet there were many many more expansions to come. So
04:07 this is an overhead shot looking at what the museum looks like today. You could
04:11 see the Richard Morris Hunt addition right here in the center. You could see
04:15 the McKim, Mead & White wings on either end and within you could see the original
04:21 Calvert, Vaux and Jacob Ray mold building here. And then you could see that they've
04:27 totally infilled. And what's amazing about this photograph is that this
04:31 museum is almost the size of the Great Lawn, if not bigger, which contains six
04:35 baseball fields. In this building it's two million square feet. That's
04:40 unbelievably large when you think the average two-bedroom apartment in New
04:44 York City is actually a thousand square feet. So that's basically 2,000 New York
04:49 City two-bedroom apartments. So this is one of the most visited museums in the
04:53 world but because of its size and its massive scale actually it's able to
04:57 accommodate an enormous amount of people. This building is so big it's like a
05:00 city unto itself and because of that the crowds just sort of disperse within it
05:06 unlike other museums where people get really sort of congested. And it's got
05:10 one of the great urban spaces in New York City with its huge entrance
05:14 staircase. So paintings are sensitive to natural light. In fact they should be
05:18 protected from natural light typically because they will degrade over time. So
05:21 architects typically want to limit the amount of natural light in galleries but
05:25 they want to maximize the amount of natural light in gathering places. And
05:29 because it's such a wide and varied collection there are some areas that
05:33 have skylights like in the sculpture court where natural light is welcome and
05:38 there are other areas where the artwork is very protected. Vox and Mould's
05:42 original building has these blind windows at the top. Hunt follows that
05:47 same idea except for in the Great Hall where the people are and you want the
05:51 natural light. This building is so big that there's buildings on display within
05:57 the building. There's an Egyptian temple, a Chinese garden, the nave of a medieval
06:02 church, a Frank Lloyd Wright living room, the porch to a Lewis Comfort Tiffany
06:08 Garden estate, the facade of an early American bank, a two-story courtyard of a
06:14 Spanish villa. It's unbelievable how many different and varied spaces there are
06:19 within it. The best part about it is it's impossible to discover the entire thing.
06:23 You can go back year after year after year and there's still always something
06:28 new to discover within it. And this being one of the largest collections in the
06:32 world and this building being one of the biggest buildings in the world, they
06:36 can't even fit it all here. They have to keep some of it at the Cloisters all the
06:39 way uptown. Next up, another great museum that created its own context but in a
06:44 different way. The Museum of Modern Art was founded in 1929 but they didn't
06:48 build their first building until 1939 by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durrell Stone.
06:53 And they built that building in midtown Manhattan of all places on 53rd Street
06:58 between 5th and 6th Avenues. So the Museum of Modern Art was founded by
07:03 these three very important women. Lily P. Bliss, Mary Quinn Sullivan, and Abby
07:08 Aldridge Rockefeller. And at that time, West 53rd Street was sort of a fancy
07:13 part of town where people of means lived in richly appointed brownstones and
07:18 townhouses. You can see these four and five story, what are basically residential
07:24 buildings, flanking it. And then right in the center of that is this great modern
07:28 Bauhaus style building. So what gives it this sort of Bauhaus style is that it's
07:33 this very stripped down form of modernism. And it's got these ribbon
07:37 windows. It has this cantilevered roof at the top with these circular openings.
07:43 And it's got this very large section of translucent glass. So they specifically
07:49 built a modern style building to house their modern art. It's basically the same
07:55 height as all the other buildings but it's completely different in character
07:59 because of its modern styling. And it really stands out in its context, calling
08:05 a lot of attention to itself. So in comparison to collections from previous
08:08 eras, like at the Metropolitan, the galleries that display the modern art
08:12 are these clean white boxes as compared to these sort of ornate galleries that
08:18 display older art at other museums. This was like the first of its kind in this
08:23 country to show modern art and they did it in a very modern way. So in this
08:27 original context the museum really stands out amongst these sort of older
08:32 buildings. But as years went by and MoMA expanded, much like the Metropolitan
08:37 expanded, they completely changed the context of 53rd Street. So let's take a
08:42 look at what it looks like now. So here's 53rd Street in the year 2023 and you
08:46 can see the original building is still there. But just to the right of it you
08:50 can see an addition that Philip Johnson did in the 1950s. And just past it to the
08:56 west you could see an addition that was by Cesar Pelli who did this big tower
09:01 that the museum expanded into. And then in 2004 by Yoshio Taniguchi which added
09:07 that blade sign and all this glass. And then as recently as 2019 there was an
09:12 addition into the Jean Nouvel tower that stands all the way to the west. So
09:17 basically MoMA now takes up the entire block except for the two ends. Unlike the
09:21 Met who made a point of sort of unifying their facade along Fifth Avenue. Here on
09:27 53rd Street MoMA doesn't do that. It's a series of very different buildings. So
09:31 really you have no idea that it's all the same institution. So it's really
09:35 interesting about these extensions as though most of them are made of glass.
09:38 From the interior you'd never know that because the art doesn't want all that
09:43 glass. And in fact they built solid walls in front of most of that glass. And only
09:47 occasionally do you get a glimpse. Do they have a little break in those solid
09:51 walls and you can see the street beyond. So now you no longer enter through what
09:57 was the original entrance. Now you enter much further west down the street and
10:02 you enter into this huge atrium. And when you're within the museum you don't
10:06 really comprehend that you're walking through these different buildings. It has
10:11 grown so large to 708,000 square feet that it's now an endless maze of these
10:17 white box rooms. But within that endless maze there's some amazing art. There's
10:23 Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night. There's Henri Rousseau's Sleeping Gypsy. There's
10:28 some of the greatest Picassos and Matisses in the world. There's Jasper
10:32 Johns and Rauschenberg and Warhol. And the hits just keep on coming. And for all
10:37 the fatigue that this museum engenders because there's so much and it's so big,
10:42 it's only one-third the size of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Next up, the
10:47 Guggenheim. This is Frank Lloyd Wright's take on a modern museum. It's just a few
10:52 blocks up from the Metropolitan. Also on Fifth Avenue. Like MoMA it was built in a
10:56 residential neighborhood but this neighborhood has remained residential.
11:00 And it's completely different than any of the buildings surrounding it. So all
11:05 these apartment houses what they do is they form this very solid street wall
11:09 along Fifth Avenue and the Guggenheim completely breaks that. It's actually
11:14 sort of this object building that is devoid of relationship to its context. So
11:20 Frank Lloyd Wright had very definite ideas of what he thought a museum should
11:23 be. And that idea was a continuous loop. So instead of a museum where you wandered
11:30 into one gallery, wandered out, and wandered into another gallery, and
11:33 wandered out, he thought it should be one linear experience from start to finish.
11:38 So this main form here is actually the galleries wrapping around a central
11:45 atrium with a skylight. So Frank Lloyd Wright's conception was you actually
11:49 take the elevator up and you descend down the entire ramp and see the display.
11:55 And he's dictating the experience of the way you see the art. So you either see it
11:59 going up or you see it coming down. But you see it in one sort of linear
12:05 sequence. So this coiled spring idea was actually based on an idea by Le Corbusier
12:11 of a sketch he did in 1929 called the Infinite Museum. So Corbusier's idea was
12:16 that you would start with a museum, a space in the center, and that you would
12:21 just keep spiraling out. So the idea is that you could add on to it infinitely
12:26 as the collection grows, which would have been a great idea for the Metropolitan.
12:29 The museum spirals out very much the way that a nautilus shell spirals out as it
12:34 grows. And that's based on the golden section. And the golden section is
12:38 basically a square with a ratio added on to it. So if you take this rectangle,
12:44 which is 1 by 1.61, what you basically get is a square here. And then you just
12:50 keep progressing in with the squares. And they get smaller and smaller as you
12:55 progress in. And when you connect the center points of those squares, it
12:59 actually forms the spiral that keeps going in. This is an ancient ratio
13:03 discovered by like the Greeks. And a lot of proportions of parts of architecture
13:08 are based on it, as well as many paintings. So let's go inside and take a
13:12 look at Frank Lloyd Wright's application of this idea. Wherever you are along
13:16 this spiral, that atrium is always part of the experience with this beautiful
13:22 skylight above. So it's this grand, beautifully lit, really impactful space.
13:28 And it's unlike any other in New York City. But it does lead to some drawbacks.
13:32 So Frank Lloyd Wright had a very definitive use of what art was. And it's
13:38 almost like he couldn't or wouldn't see beyond that. And at the time this gallery,
13:44 or this museum, was built, it was the 1950s, the height of abstract
13:48 expressionism, with these huge wall-sized canvases. And this museum doesn't really
13:54 lend itself to that kind of display. So what he did was he tilted the walls just
14:00 a bit. He tilted them out like a painter would when they're painting on their
14:04 easel. This shot clearly illustrates what it's like on the ramp when you're
14:09 looking at the art. So you can see these strong structural piers limit the width
14:13 horizontally. And the height between the ramps limits the space vertically. And
14:19 because of that, the pieces of art that you could show were limited in size. And
14:23 then the wall, you can see, is slightly canted, as you can see there. And the
14:27 other, and what I think is even more significant drawback to seeing art on
14:31 this spiral, is that you can't stand back from the painting. You could only go as
14:38 far as this rail to get back. Otherwise you have to look all the way across the
14:42 atrium, as you can see here. And obviously that's way too far back. And the other
14:46 thing that this does is there's only so much space for people to congregate. And
14:50 at a very popular show, it can get very crowded. So if there's a lot of people
14:54 standing and looking at one piece of art, the circulation path shrinks and shrinks
14:58 as the crowd increases. So when Frank Lloyd Wright got the commission, he was
15:01 directed to create a monument for art. And instead, a lot of people think what
15:07 he did was create a monument to himself. But it's one hell of a monument. Next up,
15:11 the original building for the Whitney Museum of American Art, which later
15:14 became the Met Breuer, which now has become the Frick. Who knows what will
15:18 become next. Another museum built in a residential neighborhood, but this one's
15:22 a little further east on Madison Avenue in the mid-70s. And another building that
15:27 sort of cuts itself off from the context, but in a different way. So this is a shot
15:32 looking southeast. And you could see Madison Avenue runs in front. And this
15:38 building is sort of like an inverted ziggurat in that it steps out as it goes
15:42 up. So this building was designed by Marcel Breuer, who was a Bauhaus-trained
15:46 architect, who sort of made his name originally with furniture. And what he
15:50 did here with this museum is he actually slices off with these vertical walls of
15:55 concrete the beautiful brownstones to the south and the brownstones over here
16:01 to the east. And it has very few windows. And they're this odd shape. They're this
16:05 sort of trapezoid shape that when you view from head-on almost look like you're
16:10 looking at them in perspective. The other significant thing about this museum that
16:14 sort of cuts it off from the sidewalk and from its context is it actually
16:18 springs out of a moat. There's actually a recessed sculpture garden below. And
16:23 there's this bridge that goes across like a bridge across a moat into the
16:28 main entrance of the museum. So the Bauhaus was this school in Germany that
16:33 took a modern view of all the arts, not just architecture, but it involved
16:38 product design and it involved furniture, it involved textile design and painting.
16:43 And it created this holistic view of the arts in a very, very modern way. So the
16:50 other thing about the Bauhaus was that it was about simplification and that an
16:54 object is defined by its nature. And the way that relates to this building is
16:58 that this building is extremely simple. It's really about materials and
17:02 functionality. So many people think of this building as a brutalist building,
17:06 but that really wasn't the intention. And in fact there's really these very
17:09 beautiful and sumptuous materials. So this building's built entirely out of
17:13 jet mist granite, which is this kind of grayish blackish granite with these sort
17:18 of mists of white that run through it. And it creates this very solid piece. And
17:24 it has very few windows as you could see, just seven within the galleries. So as
17:28 opposed to a whole wall of glass that gives you a whole expansive view, the
17:32 windows that are on the facade are all there, almost like another painting on
17:37 the wall to give you the frame of a very particular view. And in fact the
17:41 circulating stair is meant to be part of the experience with its beautiful and
17:45 lush materials of wood, slate, terrazzo, and concrete. So this is the smallest
17:50 museum that we've looked at. And it actually caused quite a bit of
17:54 complications for the Whitney because they outgrew it pretty soon. And they
17:57 tried to add on to it. Once in the late 70s with designs by Michael Graves. Later
18:03 in the early 2000s with designs by Rem Koolhaas. And even a few years later with
18:08 designs by Renzo Piano. But they eventually abandoned all of those ideas
18:13 and moved south to a new building by Piano in the Meatpacking District. The
18:18 other thing that distinguishes this museum from a lot of the others we
18:21 looked at is that these interior galleries were made to display big
18:27 modern pieces. And they've got very open loft-like spaces with concrete gridded
18:32 ceilings that maximize flexibility. So these are some of the great and unique
18:36 museums that New York City has to offer. Tell me what other great museums you'd
18:39 like to see us break down in the comments below.
18:43 (upbeat music)