Morgan Library.
In his history of museums, The Museum Age, Germain Bazin, former Curator of the Louvre, tells us that museums came into being because man has been an inveterate collector from his earliest recorded history. Prior to there being museums there were temples with offerings and there were private collections. Collectors who had great pride in their accomplishments and who wanted to share their treasures have almost always opened their collections to the public. When collections were merged and placed in a common building, the museum as we know it was born.
One of the great joys of the New York City art scene is that it has had examples of the spirit of collecting in many manifestations. Of the cabinet, or small personal collection, The Morgan Library and the Frick Collection have been the exemplars.
I made my first visit to the Morgan Library in the early 1960’s. Being an avid reader and a lover of books, I wanted to get some idea where my penchant for buying first editions at Strand Bookstore on 12th Street, for one dollar each in those days, was leading me. The entrance was in the center of the building on the corner of Madison and 36th Street, and one passed through the reception area, now The Marble Court, to a hallway that lead over to the library itself further east along 36th. In that hallway there was a display of some of the artwork from the collection: manuscripts, drawings, and maps. But as I recall, the primary attraction of the venue was the physical library, 1906, which is one of the stellar American examples of reproduction European architecture, Italian Renaissance.
In later years I recall there being a gallery along the backside of the long hallway, then a gallery I had not known about was opened just to the left in the entry building, and somewhat later a new gallery and garden were opened in the space between the two buildings and those buildings on 37th Street. Thus over the years I have seen the Morgan evolve from what I had thought was primarily an architectural entity to a cabinet of antique works.
For several reasons I have been slow about getting in to the City to see all the latest in museum offerings these past few years. I have just now made my first visit to the New Morgan Library and Museum. You will note that the name of the venue has now been extended; the several areas of collecting are now offered as “a small museum”.
The new focus has occasioned a major building reconceptualization as well by the noted international architect, Renzo Piano, who is the undisputed man of the hour in museum reconceptualizations. What he has wrought is lovely but I am sorry to find that this is the direction the project has gone.
In essence Sr. Piano has maintained the two early twentieth century buildings, the library and the annex building, and has removed all of the other additions and reconfigurations, as well as the Morgan House on Madison Avenue, a late nineteenth century brownstone mansion. The brownstone on the corner of Madison and 37th has been left in place.
The space of the former house is now the entry and the whole of the space between the buildings on 36th and 37th has been covered with an International Style structure that encloses Gilbert Court, a piazza, a large communal meeting place. As I have said, this is lovely. However, as with most recent museum rebuilding there appears to be more public space than expanded gallery spaces. The Morgan claims that the exhibition space has been doubled, but not all that much considering the space that is available to them, and there is increased storage space and a concert stage as well.
My criticism of the piazza, the entry, and the two new restaurants, is that I feel they have subsumed the original two buildings and the function of the venue. By shifting the entry to Madison Avenue the buildings on 36th Street are not seen when approaching the museum. As a result the visitor does not carry that image into the interior: their exterior identity, their architectural presence, has been eliminated as well. They now have the presence of historic rooms inside a museum building. In addition and in comparison to the newly defined space both the library and the gallery building now seem small, as indeed, in New York City, they are. The effect is similar to that of the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum in which Ancient Egypt meets the International Style, with the latter holding the winning hand.
But I think the best way to make this understandable is to question why the Morgan thought it needed not one but two restaurants. (Granted, they are both small.) Whereas some museums once offered food in a cafeteria, almost every American museum now boasts of a gourmet dining experience. Despite the claim, in all of these restaurants the food is no better than standard mediocre restaurant fare. (I did not sample the bill of fare here.)
At the most, a visitor to the Morgan needs not more than two hours to see the present offerings. Inviting the public to stay and sit to dinner, at outrageous museum restaurant prices, adds a function and a cost to the concept of the cabinet that eliminates that concept. In a very strong sense the newly defined areas have become the attraction and the original library, galleries, and collections the incidentals.
The sense of this loss of concept can be seen as well in the lower floor where, in a large, open space, in reality the lobby for the concert theatre, (60’s modern, with cherry wood and bright red seats, this concert hall is a fourth design style within the museum), an exhibition of drawings and photographs of the architectural project has been placed on two walls and glass vitrines have been pushed up against two other walls across the large room. These displays look not like planning so much as two after thoughts.
There are two new but extremely small galleries. The Englehard Gallery, on the second floor above the entry, is the larger and might be just the right size for the exhibition I saw there, manuscripts and drawings by, for the most part, contemporary writers. But the Clare Eddy Thaw Gallery, on the first floor is so small as to raise the question, why was it made? As an architectural entity it is “right”: it is a perfect cube resting in the space between the two original buildings. The limited exhibition space that it contains however makes it feel even smaller than it is. (It measures 20 by 20 by 20 feet.) Hence, I suspect its real function is to serve as an architectural screen masking the piazza from the 36th Street view. Making that space a gallery is a good solution as to what to do with a structure once it was there, but as a gallery, it feels decidedly detached. As a result, that enhances the awareness that all of the galleries are now disconnected. This is also emphasized by the fact that, standing in the piazza, it is not readily apparent where the galleries are: even with a plan in hand, one has to ask.
From the architectural perspective, the cube was used because of its reference to the Italian Renaissance estudiolo, a concept I have seen in the petite museum designed by Cesar Pelli at the side of his Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles. In both buildings their strongly perceived smallness overcomes the beauty of the geometric purity. On the inside both of these buildings induce claustrophobia. It’s a nice thought but I have yet to see it successfully adapted to modern use.
It has become the accepted wisdom that museums must give evidence of their commitment to growth, that they must change, and that they must have an ever larger plant. Why this is considered wisdom I do not know. Had the Morgan stayed as it was I would have been perfectly happy to continue to see their wonderful exhibitions, exhibitions unlike those offered in any other venue. I consider it a great loss to the museum going public that the example they provided, of the cabinet, has now been eradicated. I thought it had a perfectly legitimate raison d’etre.
Of the architectural details of the covered piazza I was extremely impressed by the simplicity of the essential post and beam construction, (three posts on each of the two sides) and especially by the posts. Some of these rise without interruption from the lower floors to the roof, probably 70 feet or so. And rather than being I-beams or square steel columns the square form has been opened up so that each is four angle irons of ninety degrees with the folded edges touching in the center. That open form lends a sense of lightness and gracefulness to the whole structure.
There are two glass elevators in the piazza for the Engelhard Gallery on the second level, the offices on the third, and the concert hall on the lower floor. The upper spaces are closed to the view from the main floor and the elevators are accessed by platforms that appear to be cantilevered off those walls. Their excitement is augmented by glass parapets. As much as I like these components, in considering the whole of the piazza space, I feel that their presence in that space is intrusive. Had the elevators opened directly into those galleries and offices, their being glass elevators would have provided that sense of excitement. But that would have interrupted the pedestrian flow from the entrance on the lobby floor, it would have necessitated a reconfiguration of the elevator exit in the basement, and so the shift in orientation was made. This has resulted in a dead space behind them between the two restaurants. As they stand the elevators seem either misplaced or gratuitous.
On the exterior I admire that the new entry was painted to match the stone of the older Vermont granite buildings. But I very much disliked the solid surface above the glass entry way. While I admire a blank space, this had a too strong resemblance to those flat surfaces applied in the fifties as remodeling over earlier architectural facades. There are still many examples of this just down the block on 34th Street.
It was nice to see the museum acknowledge the architect with an exhibition giving the history of the institution and with his designs for the new addition. To my knowledge, of all the many new museums built recently in America, only the Museum of Contemporary Art in Fort Worth has exhibited drawings of the architect’s development of the space. Especially noteworthy here is the model of the project made in a Parisian studio. It is one of the great architectural models. It includes all of the various buildings with just enough architectural detail to give it a nice texture without lapsing into a compulsive episode. One reason it works so well is that all of the various stylistic components are rendered in the same honey-colored wood giving the whole a unity that the new museum itself does not have: whereas this is “a model” seen from the outside, the exterior of the Morgan is now seen from only one side and now reads, from the inside, as a central court with “some stone doorways”
A loss of personality is not an enhancement.
The Library and Museum Plan:
http://www.themorgan.org/about/campus.asp
Photographs of the campus:
http://www.themorgan.org/about/press/TEArchitectureImages.pdf
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