Why 4 New York Museums Were Designed So Differently

The museums that New York City has to offer

are each designed very differently

for very different purposes.

Their unique designs relate specifically

to their unique collections,

from the height of abstract expressionism to one

of the largest collections in the world.

Hi, I'm Michael Wyetzner,

and I've been an architect in New York City

for over 35 years.

Today we're gonna break down four

of the most visited art museums in New York City

and see how they're designed for crowds, light and art.

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First up, the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

So the Metropolitan Museum of Art sits on Fifth Avenue.

It's five blocks long.

It goes from 80th to 85th Street,

which is actually about a quarter of a mile.

So this grand museum with one

of the greatest collections in the world is essentially free

as long as you're a New Yorker,

and it actually sits inside Central Park.

So the museum was founded in 1872,

and its original building was built in 1880

by the same architect

who designed all the buildings in Central Park,

along with Frederick Law Olmsted.

And that person is Calvert Vaux.

So let's take a look at his original design.

This building is very typical of 1870s architecture,

and that's because it has this very Victorian sort

of gothic style.

It's got this mansard roof, it's made out of red brick

with these limestone sort of base,

and it's got these granite sort of details

and these little flourishes,

and it all has this sort of fairy tale precious feel to it.

So over the decades, the museum would be expanded greatly,

but they never demolished the existing building.

They just kept growing around it.

And what I love about this photo

is these two facades particularly

are still visible in the museum today.

Along the south, there's a sculpture court,

and along the west facade here,

they actually added the Lehman Wing.

Okay, let's take a look at the first expansion

by Richard Morris Hunt.

So in the 1890s, the museum commissioned Richard Morris Hunt

to give it a greater presence along Fifth Avenue.

Richard Morris Hunt is also known for doing the base

of the Statue of Liberty,

as well as the huge Biltmore Estate

for the Vanderbilt family in North Carolina.

He created the fabulous Great Hall,

which is what you first walk into

with all those beautiful arches and domes.

And he also created that grand staircase within

that brings you up to the second floor,

and it opened in 1902

because he didn't wanna replicate what was already there,

he wanted to create his own statement.

So where Vaux and Mould used this sort

of gothic Victorian style of architecture,

Hunt uses a totally classical style Greek and Roman,

and makes the entire building out of limestone

so that they have a very separate feel.

What's great about this shot is you could see

that there's no context.

They're building in the park.

So they essentially just have nature surrounding them.

There's no buildings on either side of it.

So the architect didn't have to react to any

of the existing architecture.

He could do exactly what he wanted.

And in this case, it was create this grand facade

for this very important museum.

And if we look at this photo,

you could see the original building is sitting back here

in Central Park.

And you could see

that Richard Morris Hunt brought the museum much closer

to Fifth Avenue.

And just eight years later,

they would almost double the size of the existing museum

with a new expansion by McKim, Mead and White.

So in 1910, the museum hired

the great firm McKim, Mead and White

to put on even longer wings on either side.

And this is what makes the museum go

from basically 80th Street to 85th Street

along Fifth Avenue.

And what McKim, Mead and White did

by adding these huge wings

is they basically kept the original building intact,

like Hunt, and they also stayed with Hunt's style

of architecture, this sort of Beaux-Arts classical style.

And these wings are so huge now

that they've essentially eliminated the park

from the context, and they've created

this five-block-long street wall.

So they've, in a sense, built their own context.

So in just 30 years, the museum

has already become this sort of behemoth,

and yet there were many, many more expansions to come.

So this is an overhead shot,

looking at what the museum looks like today.

You could see the Richard Morris Hunt addition right here

in the center.

You could see the McKim, Mead and White wings on either end

and within, you could see the original Calvert Vaux

and Jacob Wrey Mould building here.

And then you could see that they've totally infilled.

And what's amazing about this photograph

is that this museum is almost the size of The Great Lawn,

if not bigger, which contains six baseball fields.

And this building, it's two million square feet.

That's unbelievably large

when you think the average two bedroom apartment

in New York City is actually 1,000 square feet.

So that's basically

2,000 New York City two bedroom apartments.

So this is one of the most visited museums in the world.

But because of its size

and its massive scale, actually, it's able

to accommodate an enormous amount of people.

This building is so big, it's like a city unto itself.

And because of that, the crowds just sort

of disperse within it

unlike other museums

where people get really sort of congested.

And it's got one of the great urban spaces in New York City

with its huge entrance staircase.

So paintings are sensitive to natural light.

In fact, they should be protected

from natural light typically

because they will degrade over time.

So architects typically wanna limit the amount

of natural light in galleries,

but they wanna maximize the amount

of natural light in gathering places.

And because it's such a wide

and varied collection, there are some areas

that have skylights, like in the Sculpture Court

where natural light is welcome.

And there are other areas

where the artwork is very protected.

Vaux and Mould's original building

has these blind windows at the top.

Hunt follows that same idea,

except for in the Great Hall where the people are

and you want the natural light.

This building is so big

that there's buildings on display within the building.

There's an Egyptian temple, a Chinese garden,

the nave of a medieval church,

a Frank Lloyd Wright living room,

the porch to a Louis Comfort Tiffany garden estate,

the facade of an early American bank, a two-story courtyard

of a Spanish villa.

It's unbelievable how many different

and varied spaces there are within it.

The best part about is it's impossible

to discover the entire thing.

You can go back year after year after year,

and there's still always something new

to discover within it.

And this being one of the largest collections in the world

and this building being one

of the biggest buildings in the world,

they can't even fit it all here.

They have to keep some of it

at the Cloisters all the way uptown.

Next up, another great museum

that created its own context, but in a different way.

The Museum of Modern Art was founded in 1929,

but they didn't build their first building until 1939

by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durrell Stone.

And they built that building in Midtown Manhattan,

of all places, on 53rd Street

between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.

So the Museum of Modern Art was founded

by these three very important women, Lillie P. Bliss,

Mary Quinn Sullivan, and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller.

And at that time, West 53rd Street was sort of a fancy part

of town where people of means lived

in richly appointed brownstones and townhouses.

You can see these four and five story,

what are basically residential buildings flanking it.

And then right in the center of that

is this great modern Bauhaus style building.

So what gives us this sort of Bauhaus style

is that it's this very stripped down form of modernism

and it's got these ribbon windows,

it has this cantilevered roof at the top

with these circular openings,

and it's got this very large section of translucent glass.

So they specifically built a modern style building

to house their modern art.

It's basically the same height as all the other buildings,

but it's completely different in character

because of its modern styling.

And it really stands out in its context,

calling a lot of attention to itself.

So in comparison to collections from previous eras,

like at the Metropolitan, the galleries

that display the modern art are these clean white boxes

as compared to these sort of ornate galleries

that display older art at other museums.

This was like the first of its kind in this country

to show modern art and they did it in a very modern way.

So in this original context, the museum really stands out

amongst these sort of older buildings.

But as years went by, and MoMA expanded,

much like the Metropolitan expanded,

they completely changed the context of 53rd Street.

So let's take a look at what it looks like now.

So here's 53rd Street in the year 2023.

And you could see the original building is still there,

but just to the right of it, you can see an addition

that Philip Johnson did in the 1950s

and just past it to the West,

you could see an addition that was by Cesar Pelli

who did this big tower that the museum expanded into.

And then in 2004 by Yoshiio Taniguchi,

which added that blade sign and all this glass.

And then as recently as 2019,

there was an addition into the Jean Nouvel Tower

that stands all the way to the west.

So basically, MoMA now takes up the entire block,

except for the two ends.

Unlike the Met who made a point of sort

of unifying their facade along Fifth Avenue,

here on 53rd Street, MoMA doesn't do that.

It's a series of very different buildings.

So really, you have no idea

that it's all the same institution.

So what's really interesting about these extensions

is though most of them are made of glass, from the interior,

you'd never know that

because the art doesn't want all that glass.

And in fact, they built solid walls

in front of most of that glass.

And only occasionally do you get a glimpse,

do they have a little break in those solid walls

and you can see the street beyond.

So now you no longer enter through

what was the original entrance.

Now you enter much further west down the street

and you enter into this huge atrium.

And when you're within the museum,

you don't really comprehend that you're walking

through these different buildings.

It has grown so large to 708,000 square feet

that it's now an endless maze of these white box rooms.

But within that endless maze, there's some amazing art.

There's Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night,

there's Henri Rousseau's Sleeping Gypsy.

There's some of the greatest Picassos

and Matisses in the world.

There's Jasper Johns and Rauschenberg and Warhol.

And the hits just keep on coming.

And for all the fatigue that this museum engenders

because there's so much and it's so big,

it's only 1/3 the size

of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Next up, the Guggenheim.

This is Frank Lloyd Wright's take on a modern museum.

It's just a few blocks up from the Metropolitan,

also on Fifth Avenue.

Like MoMA, it was built in a residential neighborhood,

but this neighborhood has remained residential

and it's completely different than any

of the buildings surrounding it.

So all these apartment houses,

what they do is they form this very solid street wall

along Fifth Avenue,

and the Guggenheim completely breaks that.

It's actually sort of this object building that is devoid

of relationship to its context.

So Frank Lloyd Wright had very definite ideas

of what he thought a museum should be,

and that idea was a continuous loop.

So instead of a museum where you wandered into one gallery,

wandered out and wandered into another gallery

and wandered out,

he thought it should be one linear experience

from start to finish.

So this main form here is actually the galleries wrapping

around a central atrium with a skylight.

So Frank Lloyd Wright's conception

was you actually take the elevator up

and you descend down the entire ramp and see the display,

and he's dictating the experience

of the way you see the art.

So you either see it going up or you see it coming down,

but you see it in one sort of linear sequence.

So this coiled spring idea was actually based on an idea

by Le Corbusier of a sketch he did in 1929

called the Infinite Museum.

So Corbusier's idea was that you would start with a museum,

a space in the center,

and that you would just keep spiraling out.

So the idea is that you could add onto it infinitely

as the collection grows,

which would've been a great idea for the Metropolitan.

The museum spirals out very much the way

that a nautilus shell spirals out as it grows,

and that's based on the golden section.

And the golden section is basically a square

with a ratio added onto it.

So if you take this rectangle, which is one by 1.61,

what you basically get is a square here.

And then you just keep progressing in with the squares

and they get smaller and smaller as you progress in.

And when you connect the center points of those squares,

it actually forms the spiral that keeps going in.

This is an ancient ratio discovered by like the Greeks,

and a lot of proportions of parts

of architecture are based on it, as well as many paintings.

So let's go inside and take a look

at Frank Lloyd Wright's application of this idea.

Wherever you are along this spiral,

that atrium is always part of the experience

with this beautiful skylight above.

So it's this grand, beautifully lit,

really impactful space,

and it's unlike any other in New York City,

but it does lead to some drawbacks.

So Frank Lloyd Wright had very definitive views

of what art was, and it's almost like he couldn't

or wouldn't see beyond that.

And at the time, this gallery

or this museum was built, it was the 1950s,

the height of abstract expressionism

with these huge wall-sized canvases.

And this museum doesn't really lend itself

to that kind of display.

So what he did was he tilted the walls just a bit,

he tilted them out like a painter would

when they're painting on their easel.

This shot clearly illustrates

what it's like on the ramp when you're looking at the art.

So you could see these strong structural piers

limit the width horizontally,

and the height between the ramps

limits the space vertically.

And because of that, the pieces of art

that you could show were limited in size.

And then the wall you could see is slightly canted

as you could see there.

And the other, and what I think

is even more significant drawback

to seeing art on this spiral,

is that you can't stand back from the painting.

You could only go as far as this rail to get back,

otherwise you have to look all the way across the atrium,

as you could see here.

And obviously, that's way too far back.

And the other thing that this does

is there's only so much space for people to congregate.

And at a very popular show, it can get very crowded.

So if there's a lot of people standing

and looking at one piece of art,

the circulation path shrinks

and shrinks as the crowd increases.

So when Frank Lloyd Wright got the commission,

he was directed to create a monument for art.

And instead, a lot of people think

what he did was create a monument to himself,

but it's one hell of a monument.

Next up, the original building for the Whitney Museum

of American Art, which later became the Met Breuer,

which now has become the Frick.

Who knows what it'll become next.

Another museum built in a residential neighborhood

but this one's a little further east on Madison Avenue

in the mid-'70s.

And another building that's sort

of cuts itself off from the context, but in a different way.

So this is a shot looking southeast,

and you could see Madison Avenue runs in front.

And this building is sort of like an inverted ziggurat

in that it steps out as it goes up.

So this building was designed by Marcel Breuer,

who was a Bauhaus-trained architect who sort

of made his name originally with furniture.

And what he did here with this museum

is he actually slices off

with these vertical walls of concrete,

the beautiful brownstones to the south

and the brownstones over here to the east,

and it has very few windows, and they're this odd shape.

They're this sort of trapezoid shape

that when you view from head on

almost look like you're looking at them in perspective.

The other significant thing about this museum that sort

of cuts it off from the sidewalk

and from its context is it actually springs out of a moat.

There's actually a recessed sculpture garden below,

and there's this bridge that goes across like a bridge

across a moat into the main entrance of the museum.

So Bauhaus was this school in Germany

that took a modern view of all the arts,

not just architecture, but it involved product design

and it involved furniture

and it involved textile design and painting.

And it created this holistic view of the arts

in a very, very modern way.

So the other thing about the Bauhaus

was that it was about simplification

and that an object is defined by its nature.

And the way that relates to this building

is that this building is extremely simple.

It's really about materials and functionality.

So many people think of this building

as a brutalist building,

but that really wasn't the intention.

And in fact, there's really

these very beautiful sumptuous materials.

So this building's built entirely out of jet mist granite,

which is this kind of grayish, blackish granite

with these sort of mists of white that run through it.

And it creates this very solid piece.

And it has very few windows, as you could see,

just seven within the galleries.

So as opposed to a whole wall of glass

that gives you a whole expansive view, the windows

that are on the facade are all there,

almost like another painting on the wall to give the frame

of a very particular view.

And in fact, the circulating stair is meant to be part

of the experience with its beautiful

and lush materials of wood, slate, terrazzo, and concrete.

So this is the smallest museum that we've looked at,

and it actually caused quite a bit of complications

for the Whitney 'cause they outgrew it pretty soon.

And they tried to add onto it once in the late '70s

with designs by Michael Graves,

later in the early 2000s with designs

by Rem Koolhaas

and even a few years later with designs by Renzo Piano.

But they eventually abandoned all of those ideas

and moved south to a new building by Piano

in the Meatpacking District.

The other thing that distinguishes this museum from a lot

of the others we looked at is that these interior galleries

were made to display big, modern pieces,

and they've got very open loft-like spaces

with concrete gridded ceilings that maximize flexibility.

So these are some of the great

and unique museums that New York City has to offer.

Tell me what other great museums you'd like

to see us break down in the comments below.

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