But a $ 69 million transformation, which the museum unveiled this month, is astonishing. It is no longer a forbidding bookend to the grand axis of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. Now it feels like an extension of the park itself. The nearby Unisphere seems to be on display inside, so clear is the view through the glass curtain wall of the museum’s facade.
Daylight fills the new atrium, a space made possible by the removal of the ice rink that once shared the building. The light is gentle, softened and diffused by a great rectangular lantern suspended from the ceiling. Composed of 12 rows of angled, translucent glass panels, the lantern is reminiscent of lamps designed by the sculptor Isamu Noguchi. Except that it is 30 feet high.
Admirers of the museum’s revered and quirky centerpiece — the Panorama of the City of New York, a 1-to-1,200 scale model of all five boroughs, constructed for the 1964-65 World’s Fair — will find another reason to celebrate. The Panorama can now be entered directly from the main lobby through a glass doorway that offers an intriguing glimpse of Coney Island, Sea Gate and Gravesend Bay.
The lobby floor was reset at the equivalent of sea level on the model, meaning that this 5-foot-9-inch reporter looks down on Brooklyn from the scale-model altitude of about 7,000 feet.
Tom Finkelpearl, the executive director of the Queens Museum (it shed “of Art” in the renovation), said he was in love with a shallow cascade of four steps, in a broad U-shape, that divide the lobby and create an informal sunken amphitheater. Museumgoers have already gravitated to these impromptu benches without prompting, voting with their seats.
This is a long way from where matters stood in January 2005, after museum and city officials decided to part ways with the architect Eric Owen Moss, to his dismay and evident surprise. Mr. Moss had won a competition in 2002 to reimagine the museum, which was squeezed awkwardly into the New York City pavilion from the World’s Fair of 1939-40.
That threw the choice of a new architect to a pilot procedure called the Design and Construction Excellence Program. Under one part of this program, the city enters into standing procurement contracts with a short list of architectural firms, chosen for the quality of their work. Then, for the next couple of years, the Department of Design and Construction, together with the city agencies that are its clients, can call on any of those firms, as needed, to work on municipal projects.
David J. Burney, the commissioner of design and construction, said the program typically saved up to nine months from the process of securing architectural services. What’s more, it all but ensures that the work will be handled by well-regarded, innovative designers.
Grimshaw Architects, an international practice based in London, was on this list in 2004, as a joint venture with Ammann & Whitney of New York.
Mark Husser, the managing partner of Grimshaw’s New York office, had worked under the federal design excellence program on a courthouse in Denver when he was with the firm of Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum. So he was already convinced of the value of such an approach.
“That program transformed America’s investment in federal buildings and obviously became a prototype for cities and municipalities,” Mr. Husser said. “When it became public that this would be part of the Bloomberg administration’s design initiative, we were very interested.”
But Grimshaw had not yet designed any museums in North America.
“I hadn’t heard of them,” Mr. Finkelpearl allowed.
Grimshaw won the museum over.
“Grimshaw produced a menu that enabled Tom and his people to think through what they wanted to do with their money,” Mr. Burney said. He distinguished this approach from architectural competitions that leave clients trying to figure out how to pay for a highly publicized design, whether it serves their needs or not.
Mr. Burney said his agency did not necessarily look to a firm’s experience with a given building type when making a choice. “We try to avoid the siloing of architects,” he said.
The city’s design excellence program, which was in its experimental phase when the Queens Museum job came along, is now standard operating procedure. Six firms are currently eligible for projects worth $ 15 million or more: Allied Works Architecture, BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group, Ennead Architects, Steven Holl Architects, Studio Gang Architects and TEN Arquitectos. For smaller jobs, 20 firms are on call.
Grimshaw has been in the cohort three times since 2004, but is not currently. “We like to bring in some new blood, as well,” Mr. Burney explained.
“We’re trying to match the right design team to the right project,” he said. “We’re like a dating agency.”
“And once that’s done,” he added, “we’re like the marriage counselor.”
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