architecture Archives - Page 2 of 5

May 1, 2018March 31, 2024

Statue of Liberty Museum

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Should you go?
Time spent	123 minutes (not counting time going through security, waiting for the ferry, or on the ferry)
Best thing I saw or learned	I’d never given much thought to the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal. So the story of its design — and the near failure of the effort to raise the money to build it — fascinated me. Yes, it’s like choosing frame over the painting, but still. Think how different she’d look if they’d gone with a stepped, Aztec-looking pyramid as her base. Or something Egyptian revival.

Note: This is my entry about the original Statue of Liberty Museum, dating from May of 2018. Please see my updated review of the new museum on Liberty Island, here.

There aren’t all that many museums built to honor a single work of art. Right? I assert that and now suddenly I’m unsure of myself. In New York, there’s Walter de Maria’s Earth Room. And I think of the Hall of Fame for Great Americans as a single, unified whole, even though many busts of great men (and a few women) comprise it. And the Statue of Liberty Museum makes three.

Statue of Liberty, New York Harbor — Lady Liberty

The Statue of Liberty Museum occupies a substantial space in Liberty’s pedestal. It tells the story of the genesis, engineering, construction, and gifting of the statue, as well as her absolutely iconic role as a symbol of freedom, democracy, New York, and the United States. Among other treasures, it includes the statue’s original torch, glass and lit from inside. Continue reading “Statue of Liberty Museum”

March 24, 2018

Staten Island Museum

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Should you go?
Time spent	94 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	I had completely forgotten about New York’s state fossil, until the Staten Island Museum reminded me. It’s a sea scorpion or eurypterid, which I would absolutely not want to meet on a Jurassic beach. The State Fossil!

The Staten Island Museum started as a private pooling of personal natural history collections in 1881, opening to the public in 1908. Currently it claims to be New York’s only truly encyclopedic museum, embracing science, history, and art. And so it does, albeit in small doses of each.

The museum formerly resided in a classical building in St. George, near the Staten Island Ferry, until last year, when it moved to Snug Harbor. It’s a bus or car ride from the ferry terminal, but at least the architecture is still appropriately museum-y.

Staten Island Museum

The Snug Harbor Cultural Center is Staten Island’s Mall of Enlightenment. A Chinese Scholar’s Garden, a Children’s Museum, the fantastic Noble Maritime Collection, the hit-or-miss Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, and the Staten Island Museum all reside within its more-or-less renovated, beautiful, Greek revival grounds and buildings. Continue reading “Staten Island Museum”

March 20, 2018March 20, 2018

National Track and Field Hall of Fame

encap

Edification value
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Should you go?
Time spent	75 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	The black and red bars near the ceiling are the world’s highest pole vaults… The curators integrated visual depictions of track and field world records into the exhibition. Bars mark heights of high jumps, lines on the floor show long jumps and shot puts and such. It’s one thing to read a record, a much more viscerally impressive thing to see one in the flesh.

This is my second hall of fame (after the Hall of Fame for Great Americans), and the second museum in one of New York’s antique armory buildings (after the Park Avenue Armory). However, it is my first museum devoted to a sport. New York doesn’t have, say, a museum to baseball or football. Or soccer.

Metropolitan Museum of Art — Baseball cards at The Met

There are sports legends waxified at Madame Tussaud’s. The Jackie Robinson Museum hopefully exists in New York’s future. And the Met has its baseball card collection, which I suspect it keeps mainly to show it’s even more encyclopedic than the Louvre. But in general sports are an underserved museum topic in New York City.

The National Track and Field Hall of Fame resides in the 1909 22nd Core of Engineers Armory in Harlem. The entire building is now a track-and-field complex, with a running track in the vast former drill hall. Like most of New York’s armories the architecture is cool and castle-like.

Continue reading “National Track and Field Hall of Fame”

March 16, 2018March 17, 2018

United Nations Headquarters

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Should you go?
Time spent	138 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	Octavio Roth’s depiction of the 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as cheerful, colorful lithographs. I particularly like the one about the right to leisure, which uses sailing as its visual. Octavio Roth, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, UN

As I was walking toward the East River on 42nd Street to meet a friend for my 11:30 tour of the United Nations, I realized that this institution breaks one of the rules of my museum project. I set out to visit every museum in New York City. Technically, in a legalistic, treaty sense of the world, the 17-ish acres of Manhattan occupied by the UN are not part of New York, or even of the United States. The UN is its own extranational entity. So from that perspective it isn’t a “New York museum.”

Then again, I should be less pedantic.

United Nations

Continue reading “United Nations Headquarters”

February 25, 2018

National September 11 Museum

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Should you go?
Time spent	133 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	A special exhibition of New Yorker covers that featured the Twin Towers both before and after Sept. 11. My favorite of all is probably this one from 2003, showing New York’s iconic buildings twinned. Particularly timely exhibition now that Condé Nast’s headquarters are in One World Trade Center.

The National September 11 Memorial & Museum bills itself as a single, unified whole. And indeed, the museum is integrally part of the plaza, a cavernous underground space that extends all around– and under– the footprints of the World Trade Center towers. However, for my purposes I’m thinking about them separately.

National September 11 Memorial and Museum — The WTC Memorial

The September 11 Memorial, with its somber square fountains and all the names, is one thing: well worth a visit even as the Trade Center has gone from being a giant hole in the ground to being a thriving center for commerce and commuting once again.

The September 11 Museum I don’t recommend so heartily.

Continue reading “National September 11 Museum”

February 19, 2018

Living Museum

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Should you go?
Time spent	62 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	John Tursi’s prolific, colorful, abstractions, en masse, amazed me. John Tursi, Abstract Paintings A friend accompanied me to the Living Museum, and when Tursi asked her opinion of them, she replied unthinkingly, “This is crazy.”

I don’t believe in psychic powers. If they existed, we would have proved it by now. And yet, I can’t deny that some places have an inexplicable aura about them — a feeling indelibly embedded in the stones and bricks. Ellis Island, full of hopes and dreams from long ago. The library at Columbia, resonant with over a century of stress and study.

I mention this to set up my initial reaction to visiting the campus of Creedmoor Psychiatric Center. Even just driving by Creedmoor’s forbidding deco-institutional buildings along the Grand Central Parkway, it commands attention. You may not know what it is or what goes on there, but it has a hulking presence. For lack of a better word, it’s creepy. It comes as no surprise that it is a mental hospital.

The Living Museum, Creedmoor Psychiatric Hospital, Queens Creedmoor dates back to 1912, when an abandoned National Guard barracks was used to house a few dozen patients. At its peak in 1959, the sprawling facility housed an inconceivable 7,000 patients. Since then, the inpatient population has fallen, leading it to sell the farm (literally), and also to abandon some buildings, adding to the creepiness of the campus today. And at Creedmoor’s heart, in the ginormous former inmate cafeteria, lies the Living Museum.

Continue reading “Living Museum”

January 31, 2018April 11, 2021

Museum of Modern Art

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Should you go?
Time spent	221 minutes (3 hours, 41 minutes)
Best thing I saw or learned	It’s nigh impossible to pick a “best” at MoMA. But I feel a special love for Mark Rothko’s melancholy, soothing No. 16 (Red, Brown, and Black) from 1958.

UPDATE APRIL 2021: This review is obsolete, as it was written before MoMA opened its most recent expansion (which I talk about a bit in the review below). I will hopefully publish an updated review…soon. A lot of my take from a few years ago is still pertinent.

The walls at the Museum of Modern Art don’t meet the floors. It’s a minuscule detail. I feel certain many visitors don’t even consciously notice it. I’m not sure why the architect did that. But think about the words that describe the collection: “groundbreaking,” “earth-shattering.” I like to think they decided MoMA’s treasures are too wonderful to touch something as mundane as a floor. So the art, and the walls on which the art is hung, don’t.

More mundanely, I also wonder whether (and how) they dust all those wall-floor cracks. Continue reading “Museum of Modern Art”

December 22, 2017December 30, 2017

Judd Foundation

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Time spent	104 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	Donald Judd’s dining table looks exactly like Donald Judd designed a dining table. Utterly simple wood with chairs that seamlessly, create a box when its 14 chairs were pushed in. It reminded me of one of those wooden cube puzzles where you remove one piece and the whole thing falls apart— symmetric perfection broken. And it is the exact size of the windows in the huge, open, “eating” level of the building.

In 1968 the artist Donald Judd bought a building in then-dilapidated SoHo. Five stories high, the building was used for light industry — small factories that my guide did not call “sweatshops” but that probably were. Indeed, to this day some of the floors retain holes that show where an apparel manufacturer bolted down sewing machines.

Donald Judd Foundation

Judd, his wife Julie Finch, and their newborn son Flavin moved into the place, and Judd proceeded to remake the four upstairs floors to his own design. Judd changed floors and ceilings, installed fittings and fixtures, and designed both art and furniture specifically for the place. He also installed art from his friends and fellow SoHo Bohemians. He made the place their home, but he also made their home a work of art. Continue reading “Judd Foundation”

December 10, 2017December 10, 2017

Lower East Side Tenement Museum

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Should you go?
Time spent	109 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	My favorite fun fact from the tour is that the Lower East Side got the moniker “Klein Deutschland” before there even was a unified “Deutschland.”

There are certain combinations of places and architecture that just go together. Paris+garret; Newport+mansion; San Francisco+Victorian ; Brooklyn+brownstone. And “Lower East Side+tenement.” It’s almost redundant to call a place the “Lower East Side Tenement Museum.” But New York has one of those, and redundant or not, it is a fantastic, unforgettable recreation of a slice of life in this city.

Tenement Museum

How the Other Half Lived

The word “tenement” originally referred to any multiple dwelling building, what we’d call an “apartment” today. Very quickly, however, “tenement” came to mean a very particular type of multiple dwelling building. One aimed at the working class and recent immigrants, crammed with people and with very limited light, ventilation, and amenities.

Like how non-New Yorkers imagine New Yorkers live today, only even worse. Continue reading “Lower East Side Tenement Museum”

December 9, 2017December 10, 2017

Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine

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Should you go?
Time spent	58 minutes (most recently)
Best thing I saw or learned	A vertical tour brings you up close to the engineering of an old-school cathedral. The building is buttressed to support the weight of an enormous tower that was never built. Above the ceiling… To balance that buttressing, there’s literally tons of lead above the ceiling vaults, pushing down and out as the buttresses push in.

Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine

Although I have rarely attended a service there, the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine has figured large in my life in New York City.

Shortly after I arrived as a freshman at Columbia, I attended an event at the Cathedral. The Dalai Lama spoke, as did the daughter of Desmond Tutu. I vividly remember it was right around Rosh Hashanah, and a group of monks offered a chant in honor of the High Holy Days. Tibetan Buddhist monks singing in honor of the Jewish new year in the largest Christian cathedral in the world. To this day, that stands as one of my quintessential New York experiences. Continue reading “Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine”