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The Morgan Library and Museum reopens
The Morgan Library and Museum is one of the most impressive, yet intimate and rarefied museums in New York City, so some of its admirers were not enthusiastic when it announced its plan to expand and closed down more than three years ago. Happily, when the library reopened on April 29, it was clear that the enlargement has not affected the intimacy that visitors have always found so pleasing.
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Renzo Piano, the Paris- and Genoa-based architect of this $102 million project, has designed numerous museums and museum additions in this country and elsewhere, but this is his first completed project of any kind in New York City. No expansion that he designs is commonplace, but all of them are sensitive to the mandates of the commissioning institution. In the case of the Morgan Library, the result is quiet, elegant, and fresh.
Piano was given the formidable task of uniting the three architecturally disparate buildings that comprised the library--the original marble-clad structure of 1906 designed by Charles McKim of McKim, Mead and White; a nineteenth-century town-house; and the 1928 annex, designed by Benjamin Wistar Morris. Piano accomplished this by designing three glass and steel pavilions that face Thirty-sixth Street, Thirty-seventh Street, and Madison Avenue, where the entrance is now located. The smallest of the pavilions is a perfectly proportioned twenty-foot cube that houses the greatest rarities of medieval and early Renaissance decorative arts in the collection.
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Some seventy-five thousand square feet of new space has been added, nearly doubling the size of the institution. Much of the addition is fifty feet below ground, and includes exhibition galleries; storage vaults; and visitor services, such as an auditorium, reading room, and cafes. The bookstore is located in what were lavish domestic spaces of Pierpont Morgan Jr.'s house. One room has elegantly carved architectural details and the other has gilded boiserie, making these among the most sumptuous retail spaces in New York City.
Most of the interior walls not devoted to galleries are faced with warm cherry wood, including the 280-seat auditorium and the reading room. The wood is juxtaposed with glass, which sets off the elevator shaft, staircases, and railings around the cantilevered balconies that punctuate the soaring glass atrium at the library's core.
Piano has a deep respect for the piazzas that seem to appoint every town and city in his native Italy and provide visual relief from the densely built-up streets that surround them. At the library he has provided two piazzas--one inside (the atrium) and the other outside the library. The open-air garden on the Thirty-sixth Street side is accessible to the public and will most likely establish itself as a convenient gathering place in midtown in clement weather, just as Bryant Park became after its excellent renovation several years ago.
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All of the exhibitions currently on view celebrate the library's rarest holdings, including ninety old master drawings by such luminaries as Leonardo, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Rubens, and more modern examples by Cezanne, Degas, and Pollock. Another exhibition devoted to medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts includes the Reims Gospel Book, dating from about 860, and the Farnese Hours of 1546. A third features literary and historical manuscripts from works by Dickens, Steinbeck, Twain, Austen, Wilde, and Pound; and musical scores by Mozart, Strauss, Beethoven, and Schumann. One of the library's three copies of the Gutenberg Bible; Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, with illustrations by John Tenniel; and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, containing her annotations, are highlights from the display of printed books. Finally a group of ancient pictorial seals from Mesopotamia, dating from between 3500 and 330 BC, are a strength of this institution's holdings and were a special interest of Pierpont Morgan's, no doubt because, although pictorial, they are a very early form of communication. The final exhibition in this series of remarkable shows is devoted to the evolution of the design of the library expansion. It includes drawings, models, and photographs by Piano and members of his firm, and it demonstrates what a difficult assignment this was and how the new suite of buildings manages to provide new space while retaining the intimacy of this special institution. |
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