The corner of New York did not seem quite alone, because the FRICK collection closed during the Covid for the architectural equivalent of treatment of full body.
The museum, which is bouncing at the head of Henry Clay Frick at Beaux-Arts on the fifth Avenue, met his old gentlemen and other art of the former Whitney Museum Marcel Breuer a few blocks. See Bellini’s “St. Francis in the desert ”va Brutalist building I felt like at a spring break at Cocoa Beach.
The next month Frick will reopen after expansion and reconstruction of $ 220 million. For years, the preservatives have pinged my delivered mail and bleed their anxiety about handling one of the architectural treasures of the city.
I don’t know good rumors. The expansion is probably as sensitive and defament as you could hope. In moments, as in the sensual new marble staircase and airy auditorium, it approaches poetry. It probably won’t calm down all the critics. Grumblers will be Grumblers. But he does what was intended. It moves Frick directly to the 21st century and smoothly solves various problems. And where it counts, it leaves well enough.
The architect is German, New York based Annabelle Selldorf. She and her colleagues in Selldorf Architects Paired with Beyer Blinder Belle, another New York company and the garden of designer Lynden B. Miller. These days, Selldorf is an architect for thorny projects like this. In London, the Hor -Footed Wing of the National Gallery is designed in the 90’s Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.
Frick’s Mansion, completed in 1914, was designed by Carrère and Hastings, which gave New York 42. In 2001, Selldorf forced its bones to turn the bones from 1914, from 1914, OneTime Vanderbilt Mansion, to the fifth Avenue. With care and creativity, she turned her into the most modern Neue Gallery Ronald Lauder.
The extension of Frick was a more complicated task. That required sacrifice. To begin with Selldorf, Frick’s beloved music room, John Russell Pope, August architect for Jefferson Memorial, added when he supervised Frick’s Mansion-Museum transformation During the 30 years. The Pope doubled the trace of the building.
Like the others, I’m sad that I lost my music room. Over the years, as opponents of his loss have accepted the point become New York version of the 19th century salon. In fact, with 149 seats it was too small for many events and its acoustics was average. It also took the ideal place to introduce new galleries for temporary exhibitions that Frick needed and was essential for the SELLDORF plan.
So it happened. Selldorf installed three new galleries.
To replace the music room, which dug under the 70s. Frick Garden and designed a technologically up-to-date, 218-sitting auditorium, shaped a bit like the interior of the vesosis. Around the new lobby, through a low vestibule, around a curved wooden wall made of grooved walnut, you suddenly enter the surprisingly light and spacious hall, as white as the operating theater, slightly erotic with its curved plaster.
Then she turned to Frick’s reception that never worked. On crowded days you would be given to enter the Laguardia airport museum for thanksgiving. The tug arrangement of the ticket and checking the coat was created by Logjama and visited visitors to the dead ends.
Like the cardiologist, Selldorf has unscrewed passages, invented the lubricated circulation lines and improved the reception hall.
Its peak is Showstopper: A new, console staircase, sensual and dressed in Breccia Aurora marble, a decadent way of Dolce Vita. He nods at the large staircase in the headquarters. And this leads to the new second floor, which Selldorf has surgically inserted above the hall to fit into a new connection with Mansion, shop and a 60 -digit café (Frick can be the last museum on the ground) overlooking the edge, 70.
In 2014, the museum was hovering an earlier proposal to expand another architectural company, which imagined a blocked extension replacing the garden, which was designed by the British landscape architect Russell Page when the reception hall was built in the 70s. FRICK assumed at the time that the garden was temporary, replaced when the museum needs to grow again.
But thanks to its reflecting swimming pool, shaded pea gravel trails and wisteries, it was a Zen pause along the street and the New Yorkers became valuable as one of those pocket serpentists of life in the city. The concrete players were destroyed on the proposal.
Frick retreated. Two years later, Selldorf hired and committed to keeping the garden.
This turned out to be easier than it was done. Building an underground auditorium required the tearing of the garden and then planted it. It is still growing. Selldorf treats the garden with respect and organizes its largest, most amazing accessory-new floors above Mírou, where there used to be a music room adjacent to the expansion of the Pope’s nine-storey library on the 71.
Adding is repeated a narrow yard, formerly hidden behind the garden wall, where Frick stored his lawn mowers and air conditioning units. Today, the new educational center (the first for the museum) occupies this space with the café above.
Selldorf then dressed the whole increment similar to the puzzles in Indiana Limestone to match the exterior of the settlement and eventually unite the anodynic facade. Adding enters a few feet back, where a café overlooking the garden, a fine room for a number of upper beams.
I was among those who urged Frick in 2014 to make a plan to demolish the garden, and I wrote a column This went through some alternative ideas and then created bikes among New York architects. It was an exchange of the Pope’s music room for temporary exhibition spaces, digging under the garden to build additional auditoriums and the reception hall by adding another floor.
Sharing vague ideas from the peanut gallery will eventually solve any of the challenges of overwork 87,000 square feet of complex space. Ideas can be realized differently and wrong. Architecture happens in the trenches. Obtaining a Frick’s expansion required a million complex decisions, such as secular, but meaningful as a selection that the varieties of marble, between 138 different types already in the building, should attach the reception hall and in which the exact block formula. And it feels in gestures like the cornice for Hornbeams, whose subtle depth gives the garden a key whisper of the respiratory room.
This means knowledge, in other words, shares in a store with Frick. Buying art is one thing. Building a collection like Frick’s is another.
Credit also goes to Ian Wardropper, director of Frick, who supervised the entire expansion and Retired Last month. There was a stable hand in the heart of the museum. I have already mentioned that renovation knows when to leave well enough. The joy of visiting Frick remains intact. Frisson, who throws himself around the clogged robbery house, will not change.
Nothing has changed in large rooms of Titians and Fragonards, except for the wall covers of hand -woven French silk damask and velvet, which were replaced by conscientious and impressive costs. The garden court is the same, but with cleaned skylights and a fountain that now acts as a Pope for the first time in live memory.
A novelty is that visitors can first go to the large Mansion staircase to the second floor and nose around the former Frick family bedrooms, which reappeared as a gallery for Chinese porcelain, Renaissance medals, Buchras and Constables. What used to be a bathroom is suspended with French pictures Rococo. The number of objects to the permanent collection has doubled.
I look forward to the garden blooms.
Good news is a shortage these days. Frick will reopen in mid -April. The city already feels lighter.
