A corner of New York did not seem to be completely itself since the Frick collection closed a full body spa treatment during the architectural equivalent during the architectural equivalent.
For a while, the museum, which luxures in Henry Clay's Beaux-Art-Herrenhaus in the Fifth Avenue, has removed a few blocks with its old masters and other art for Marcel Breuer's former Whitney Museum. Bellinis St. see Franziskus in the desert ”in a brutalist building felt on her high school teacher in the spring holidays in cocoa edge.
The Frick will be reopened next month after its expansion and renovation of 220 million US dollars. Official relationships have been pinging my inbox for years and ventilated their fears about manipulations on one of the city's architectural treasures.
I wear good news. The expansion is roughly as sensitive and clever as one could hope. In moments, such as in a lavish new marble staircase and an airy auditorium, it approaches poetry. It will probably not calm all critics. Murren will be grumbling. But it does what was intended. It moves the Frick exactly into the 21st century and solves seamlessly varied problems. And wherever it matters, it leaves enough.
The architect is Annabelle Selldorf, born in German, resident in New York. She and her colleagues from Selldorf Architects paired with Beyer Blinder Belle, another New York company, and with the garden designer Lynden B. Miller. Nowadays Selldorf is a provider of architects for thorny projects like this. In London she updates a hotly contested wing of the National Gallery, which was designed by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown in the 1990s.
Frick's Mansion, which was completed in 1914, was designed by Carrère and Hastings, which New York gave the 42nd Street Library. In 2001 Selldorf made her bones, the unique Vanderbilt -Herrhaus, another landmark of Carrère and Hastings, further above, convert the Fifth Avenue. With care and creativity, she converted it into Ronald Lauders state -of -the -art new gallery.
The expansion of the Frick was a more difficult task. It required victims. For the beginning, Selldorf demolished Frick's beloved music room, which John Russell Pope, the August Architect for the Jefferson Memorial, added when he allowed Frick's transformation to Frick's transformation in the 1930s. Pope doubled the building of the building.
Like others, I am sad to lose the music room. Over the years, when the opponent of his loss has taken on a hint, it had become New York's version of a salon from the 19th century. To be honest, with 149 seats it was too small for many events and his acoustics was mediocre. It also took the ideal place to provide new galleries for temporary exhibitions that needed the lock and was decisive for the Selldorf plan.
So that happened. Selldorf installed three new galleries.
To replace the music room, it was excavated under the 70th street garden of the Frick's and designed a technologically current auditorium with 218 seats, which was shaped a little like the interior of a shell. After the new lobby, through a low vestibule, around a curved wooden wall made of corrugated walnut, you suddenly enter a surprisingly bright and spacious hall like an operation theater, slightly erotic with its winding plaster walls.
From the 1970s, she then turned to the Frick reception hall, which never fully worked. On overcrowded days, entry to the museum could take them into account at Laguardia Airport at Thanksgiving Eva. A tangled ticket and coat test arrangement generated logjams and supplied visitors to dead ends.
Like a cardiologist, Selldorf has released the transitions, invented cunning circulation lines and improved the reception hall.
His centerpiece is a show stopper: a new, cheating staircase, lush and in manufactured Brekzien Aurora Marble, decadent on a kind of dolce vita. It nods on the big staircase in the villa. And it leads to a new second floor that Selldorf has operated over the hall to fit a new connection with the villa, a shop and a café with 60 seats (the Frick may be the last museum on earth, which was missing) with a view of the garden of the closed 70th street.
In 2014, the museum had an earlier expansion proposal from another architecture firm that presented a blocked expansion that replaced the garden that the British landscape architect Russell Page designed in the construction of the reception hall in the 1970s. At the time, the Frick assumed that the garden would only be temporary, replaced if the museum had to grow again.
But with its reflective pool, shady pea gravel path and sliding, it was a zen -like break along the street and was estimated by the New Yorkers as one of these ideas of life in the city in the city. The nature reserves were horrified by the proposal to destroy it.
The rimmed pulled back. Two years later, Selldorf hired and undertook to keep the garden.
That was easier said than done. The construction of the underground auditorium required to tore up the garden and then plant it. It still grows back. Selldorf deals with the garden with honorary bids and organizes its greatest, ridiculous addition to new soils about where the music room was, and in addition to an expansion of the nine-story library of the Pope in the 71st Straße-Uum to drove the North end of the garden carefully.
The encore includes a narrow garden that was previously hidden behind a garden wall, where he was crazy his lawnmowers and air conditioning. A new educational center (another premiere for the museum) is taking this room with the café above.
Selldorf then dressed the entire puzzle-like addition in Indiana Limestone in order to reach the outside area of the manor house and ultimately standardize anodyne facade. The encore steps back a few foot where the café overlooks the garden and looks a finising room for a number of horn beams.
I was one of those who asked Frick in 2014 to ward off the plan to demolish the garden, and wrote a column that passed on some alternative ideas and then circulated under New York architects. This included the Pope's music room against temporary exhibition rooms from the garden in order to build another auditorium and to repeat the reception hall by adding another floor.
Share of vague thoughts from the peanut gallery In the end, none of the challenges in the redesign of 87,000 square meters of complicated space. Ideas can be realized differently and poorly. Architecture takes place in the trenches. The correct extension of the criminal expansion required a million complex decisions that, as secular, but sensible as the selection of the marble varieties, among the 138 different types in the building, the reception hall and in which precise block patterns should tile. And it can be felt in gestures like this rocky lead for the horn beam, the subtle depth of which gives the garden a decisive whispering of the breath.
It includes the connoisseur, in other words, the share in the criminal trade. Buying art is one thing. Building a collection like The Frick's is different.
Credit also goes to Ian Wardropper, the Frick Director, who monitors the entire expansion and has just retired last month. He was a steady hand in the heart of the museum. I have already mentioned that the renovation knows when you leave well enough. The joy of visiting the Frick remains intact. The chip of the strip around the stuffy house of a robber baron is unchanged.
Nothing is changed in the large rooms of Titians and Fragonards. Apart from the wall coverings of hand -woven French Seidendamast and velvet, which have been replaced conscientiously and at impressive costs. The garden court is the same, but with cleaned skylights and a fountain that is now intended as a Pope for the first time in an alive memory.
What is new is that visitors can hike for the first time through the large staircase of the manor house to the second floor and the nose around the former bedroom of the Frick Family, which are implemented as galleries for Chinese porcelain, Renaissance medals, bouchers and police officers. What used to be a bathroom is hung with French Rococo pictures. The number of objects that can be seen from the permanent collection have doubled.
I look forward to the garden blooms.
Good news is in short supply these days. The Frick will be reopened in mid -April. The city feels easier.