architecture

Why It's And then Hard to Keep Beaux-Arts Museums Looking Beautiful

The Frick mansion under construction, 1913. Photo: Wurts Bros./Museum of the City of New York

It'due south time again to give thanks Messrs. ­Carnegie, Frick, Warburg, Vanderbilt, Morgan & Co. The plutocrats of the final Aureate Age left us unfathomable architectural treasures that we cherish and fight over but are still not sure how to care for. They erected houses, museums, and libraries in the course of temples and Renaissance palazzos, great hunks of ornate stone, carved wood, and intricate parquet, anthologies of precious materials and medieval craft. Some have been lost; bear on what'due south left and we get angry, modify them and we despair. As Manhattan keeps remaking itself, one shuttered shoe-repair shop and vanished brownstone at a time, these ornate piles endure—the Frick, the Cooper Hewitt, the Public Library, the Metropolitan Museum, each with its tribe of passionate loyalists.

None of them is pristine. From the offset, they experienced decades of fitful renovation, and their occupants still keep bursting through walls. There's never enough space. Some institutions wear their history more than lightly, or have the luxury of starting fresh. The Whitney will soon motility into a brand-new edifice, and MoMA keeps knocking down anything that sits in its expansionist path. But most museums have to proceed adapting to their old homes. They build additions and gut interiors to adjust ever-expanding crowds and collections, and every time a fluted column or pedimented doorway gets in the manner of a future gallery, the same trouble crops up: how to make a yard old edifice more rational and efficient without neutralizing its ­idiosyncrasies—how, in other words, to make information technology better without ruining it completely.

The one certainty of adding to a honey Beaux-Arts monument is that most people are going to detest it. In 2001, when Davis Brody Bail slapped an ungainly glass-fronted bagginess on the side of McKim, Mead & White's Harvard Guild on West 44th Street, the society'due south members mutinied in court. They lost the legal fight, but they were morally justified; the new construction has anile every bit desperately as your high-school haircut. In 2006, Renzo Piano applied a like technique with more than finesse, and more justification, at the Morgan Library & Museum, though that renovation, too, nonetheless has some people foaming in fury.

Piano tied together an eclectic collection of historic buildings (a Victorian brownstone, J. P. Morgan's baronial library by McKim, Mead & White, and a 1928 annex) with modernist connective tissue, all pure lines and articulate glass. Edgeless contrast like that is the default strategy for expanding Beaux-Arts buildings, but it'due south not the just option. At the other extreme, in 1993 Kevin Roche doubled the size of the Jewish Museum with a tour de forcefulness of camouflage. Borrowing stonemasons from the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine and limestone from the same quarry that furnished the original mansion, Roche copied out the frippery with the devotion of a Torah scribe. The Frick wants to have that approach, too. Having defiled the Harvard Club, the architects at Davis Brody Bond now hope to add subtly and seamlessly to the existing Frick, making information technology look like a magnified mansion—the same as before, but bigger. That sleight of paw collides with a first principle of preservation: that the lines between historical periods should be articulate. What the Frick urgently needs is a third fashion, somewhere between slavish reproduction and slavish opposition. There should be a modern equivalent for the craftsmanship, detail, and luxury materials of a century ago. The problem is, at that place isn't.

To empathise why nosotros're left with those ii extreme but equally lackluster options—and why information technology's so difficult to come upwardly with a third—information technology helps to rewind to the late-19th century, when American architects gravitated to Paris'southward École des Beaux-Arts, a deluxe complex on Rue Bonaparte that served equally the incubator of official French aesthetics. The Beaux-Arts tradition was old-fashioned even then, a ­backward-looking subject area that both called to and irritated impatient American architects similar Louis Sullivan. It treasured classical elements, refracted through the French and Italian Renaissance. Substantially, the schoolhouse taught its students to produce refined knockoffs of knockoffs.

But the school was non but about a repertoire of ornaments and proportions; information technology offered a way of shaping society through architecture. Graduates aspired to blueprint civic monuments, libraries, universities, regime buildings, and temples of civilisation—the locomotives of mod life. Medieval Paris had grown in a tangle around Nôtre-Dame; the modern metropolis converged more rationally on its own cathedral, the opera business firm. Today, though opera as an art course is no longer a social unifier and Paris's old house has been upstaged by a newer one at Place de la Bastille, the immense, ornately costumed Palais Garnier stands in the urban spotlight, a grande matriarch who refuses to recognize that her time has passed.

In New York, information technology was the industrial aristocracy that commandeered Beaux-Arts ambitions, building theatrical palaces that doubled equally seats of power. The Vanderbilt family erected a row of mansions hip-to-flank along Fifth Avenue between 51st and 52nd Streets. When the patriarch, William H. Vanderbilt, completed his in 1883, he flung open the doors and an audience of 2,500 came to gawp at its gaudy marbles and carved ceilings, an opulent setting for a heroic capitalist life. Virtually at the same fourth dimension, Richard Morris Chase (architect of the Metropolitan Museum and besides the first American to attend the Paris mother schoolhouse) was building Vanderbilt's son ­William K. a French Renaissance mansion next door. This blended château for the ages lasted less than fifty years.

The Beaux-Arts aesthetic was past definition expensive. If you're going to advertise a client's fortune or a city'south greatness past merging modern technology with ancient motifs and stained-glass ceilings, carried out by scores of carvers, mosaicists, gilders, and bronze-casters, you're non going to do it on the cheap. Fifty-fifty cozy rooms were meant to impress with their lusciousness and perfection. Walls were non just paneled; they were sheathed in mahogany carved in Republic of india. People surely went blind fashioning those curlicues.

As the Aureate Age ebbed, that fussy splendor seemed increasingly out of joint in a democratic, optimistic society. Every motility toward modernism was a step away from historicism. Astringent skyscrapers, industrial-age proportions, a craving for simplicity, and the fetishistic appeal of glass, concrete, and exposed steel turned stone angels and Ionic capitals into faintly ridiculous affectations of the past. Generations of architects were trained to turn down the Beaux-Arts, and we lost the knack for its ordinary extravagances. New York's ain Gilded Age opera firm, with its flamboyantly grand interior, was torn down in 1967 and replaced by the austere one at Lincoln Center. Terra-cotta, originally an affordable and more than malleable culling to hand-carved stone, more or less went out of product around the same fourth dimension, and a lot of glazed tile façades were left to streak and crumble.

In the midst of Gilded Historic period 2, architects are cautiously trying to resurrect early on-20th-century textures here and there, with fitful success. Robert A.1000. Stern lavished limestone on his throwback condo building at 15 Central Park W. Terra-cotta is getting a new life as a deluxe trim, used sparingly in ultrahigh-priced flat buildings to ready off acres of drinking glass. And in the new Sugar Colina ­affordable-­housing circuitous in Harlem, David Adjaye tried to emulate that olden handmade texture by etching a digital pattern of roses into the façade's physical, an abstract, ghosted version of the hand-tooled thistles and ornamental vines that adorn the genteel neighborhood'southward brownstones and cornices. Adjaye managed to produce only a rough upholstery blueprint rather than a fantastical evocation of Eden, but it's hard to blame him. Laborious stonework, fanciful wrought iron, and all the other practices that once cast shadows and conjured flickering drama on a building's surface are at present practically extinct, not just considering of loftier costs and low skill simply because our civilization doesn't value them. Y'all can exhume these extravagances every in one case in a while for restoration projects (or for Roche's Jewish Museum one-off), but otherwise the city is going shiny, simple, and smoothen. That's ane reason we get so many glass-box additions. The best alleviation for ignorance is to turn information technology into a rule.

Past now, most Beaux-Arts buildings are architectural Frankenstein's monsters, having grown new limbs and internal organs and had diverse portions sawed off over the decades. All that tinkering has left an uneven legacy of splendor and scars. The New York Public Library restored the spectacular reading room in its 5th Avenue headquarters in 1998 (Davis Brody Bond again!) only recently had to shut information technology once again later a rosette detached from the ceiling in the middle of the nighttime and plummeted (harmlessly) to the floor. But that'due south the least of the building'south problems. Wander around the back-office infinite and, while the high marble hallways and dilapidated wainscoting retain a sure disheveled nobility, other rooms have degenerated into a purgatory of fluorescent tubes, dropped ceilings, and rotting linoleum. The library has scrapped its program to scoop out the stacks and implant a new circulating library, but it's still developing a strategy to turn underused and off-limits acreage into public space—a huge and potentially transformative job, but oh, and so easy to spiral up.

Different institutions grow in different ways. The Frick keeps collecting clocks, small bronzes, and porcelain. The Met adds to its stock of modern and contemporary art, for which information technology needs more rational gallery space. The Cooper Hewitt is embracing the connective power of applied science; it will reopen in December subsequently an all-encompassing overhaul past Gluckman Mayner Architects (and others) that has bared the beauty of its most voluptuous room, transformed the more utilitarian top floor from nursery-gym-storage to a big, flexible gallery, and rewired the whole infinite for the latest in interactive doodads. On a contempo preview tour, you could sense the curators' lust for apparently walls, track lighting, fresh parquet, and ample elevators. A curator can offering no greater architectural praise than to describe a room as "neutral." The crucial characteristic of the renovation, though, is non a building but a production, an electronic pen that will be issued to all visitors and so that they can redraw the globe to their liking, like Harold with his royal crayon. They can use information technology to scan labels, save images of the items they choose to a personalized database, scrawl notes and sketches on touchscreen tables, and create their ain wallpaper that gets multiplied and projected onto two full walls. In the demo, all this threatens to come dangerously close to gimmickry, but perhaps it will be revelatory in real life.

The Frick faces an even more extreme challenge, slipping a new half-dozen-story fly into its existing space without making the museum feel any bigger. Visiting Henry Clay Frick'south old mansion is like being invited to join the family for an intimate affair. You migrate through his rooms, which are still filled with his furniture, and introduce yourself to another guest, Holbein's Sir Thomas More, say, who stares by yous, looking a scrap thuggish with his five o'clock shadow, fierce eyes, and daggerlike nose pointing to some unseen interlocutor. The Frick's galleries are the reverse of contemporary neutral; they enfold the art in a domestic atmosphere, making each object seem like a possession that its owners have securely loved. That intimacy is fragile. It shattered terminal winter, when an exhibition of masterpieces from the Mauritshuis (including Vermeer's Girl With a Pearl Earring and the suddenly famous The Goldfinch) drew intolerable crowds, turning art viewing into a contact sport.

Enlarging the museum could harm it, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be tried. A new addendum would not plough the Frick into MoMA; rather, it would let the museum draw back the velvet rope that has always kept ­visitors from climbing the theatrical staircase to the unseen, fantabulous 2nd-floor rooms, now used every bit offices. Too, the Frick is already a hodgepodge of tasteful imitations. In the 1930s, John Russell Pope, an impeccably pedigreed Beaux-Arts classicist, expanded the original Carrère and Hastings mansion, adding the gracious oval gallery and Fine art Reference Library, covering the central courtyard, smoothing the seams, and hewing to the masters' habits of ornament and proportion. Forty years afterwards, a trio of architects—named, with Gilded Age grandeur, John Barrington Bayley, Harry van Dyke, and Thousand. Frederick Poehler—contributed the long, egg-yolk-yellow ticket hall to the right of the master archway, a nice bit of fakery that few visitors can ever accept questioned. Through the French doors is a delightful slice of a garden wrapped effectually a rectangular lily pond, designed by the distinguished landscape architect Russell Page in 1977. The new scheme would destroy it.

The Frick has a right to grow as it ages, and a record of graceful surgery. Only it would be a mistake to expand into another bogus Beaux-Arts creation, a knockoff of a knockoff of a knockoff. The Landmarks Preservation Commission has jurisdiction here, and it should demand a more artistic proposal. For precedents, there'southward Annabelle Selldorf'due south 2001 renovation of the Neue Galerie, an exquisitely sensitive mixture of faithfulness and freshness. Selldorf didn't have to build a new fly, but she cut, set, and buffed the interior spaces with a jeweler'southward delicacy. She paired a ravishingly spare elevator with an ebullient curving stair and faced it in white glass. She recessed rail lighting in loftier-­ceilinged antique rooms, covered the floors of new galleries in somber oak planks, and turned the paneled dining room into an evocative Viennese café. The renovation twines together vastly different periods, not in an eclectic jangle merely in delicate counterpoint. It's an example that suggests a compromise betwixt retread and plain glass box: a sumptuous alloy of freshness and respect that by now should have gear up the standard, non remain the admired exception.

*This article appears in the July 14, 2014 issue of New York Magazine.

Why It's Hard to Keep Museums Looking Beautiful