The Morgan Library & Museum Expansion - 29 East 36th Street - by Renzo Piano

[NoyokA]

NYTIMES:

A Plan Unfolds for a $75 Million Morgan Makeover

By DAVID W. DUNLAP

The Pierpont Morgan Library, an exquisite cultural treasure chest in Murray Hill, would reorient, expand and draw together its campus of historic buildings with three unmistakably modern steel-and-glass pavilions designed by Renzo Piano. The project is so ambitious it would require the Morgan to close for two years.

Under a plan presented yesterday to the Landmarks Preservation Commission, the Morgan would
move its entrance from 36th Street to Madison Avenue, create a glass-enclosed piazza in the middle of
the block, expand its gallery space, build a new auditorium and reading room, replace its office wing,
sink a new vault deep into bedrock and add a cubic structure in the yard between J. Pierpont Morgan's
original library and the later annex, both landmarks.

"Since I became director of the Morgan in 1987, my chief goal has been to provide greater public
access to both the buildings and the collections," Charles E. Pierce Jr. told the commission. He said Mr.
Piano's plan achieved the goal with "remarkable subtlety and sensibility."

The hearing adjourned without a vote by the commission on whether the expansion would be
appropriate. The commission will take up the matter again next month. It is also expected to restore
landmark status to the former J. P. Morgan Jr. house at Madison Avenue and 37th Street, which the
library acquired in 1988. The Lutheran Church in America once had its headquarters there and fought
successfully to revoke the landmark designation in 1974.

The Morgan's expansion project is to begin in 2003 and may cost up to $75 million. ("We've just
started to do serious fund-raising," Mr. Pierce said.) During the two years of construction, the library's
collection of 350,000 objects — rare books, illuminated manuscripts, prints and drawings — will be
stored elsewhere.

The architects are the Renzo Piano Building Workshop of Paris and Genoa and Beyer Blinder Belle of
New York.

Mr. Piano likened his work to microsurgery. "The spirit of the scheme is not really to grow," he said.
"It's more about rebalancing, rethinking the institution."

Of the 69,400 square feet of new space, 43,300 will be underground, in an auditorium seating about
280 people and a vault hewn from bedrock. "There is no better place to preserve books forever than
Manhattan schist," Mr. Piano told the commission.

With most of the space underground, the pavilions can be held to the same scale as the older structures
around them.

The new entrance, set back from the avenue, would replace a swoop- roofed, glass-enclosed
courtyard from 1991 by Voorsanger & Mills. Over the entrance would be a windowless facade of
recessed steel panels in a large-scale grid, behind which would be a reading room and gallery.

"Symbolically, what this building is about, above everything else, is the protection of art," Mr. Piano
said, explaining the decision to use steel in the facade. Though no decision has been made yet on color,
the architect said he was leaning toward the verdigris of weathered copper.

Beyond the lobby would be an inner courtyard that Mr. Piano likened to a piazza. Standing in this
space, at the heart of the complex, visitors would be able to orient themselves visually to their
surroundings.

On 37th Street, a small office building added in 1957 by the Lutheran Church would be replaced by a
new four-story structure.

On 36th Street, a faceted steel cube would be inserted between the original library of 1906, by
McKim, Mead & White, and the annex added 22 years later by Benjamin Wistar Morris after the
library opened to the public.

Inside would be a 20-by-20-by-20- foot room whose "magical" proportions would lend themselves to
the display of "a piece of the treasure house coming up from the vaults," Mr. Piano said.

But Robert A. M. Stern, a prominent architect and architectural historian, told the commission by letter
that he was concerned the cube "unnecessarily compromises the gardenesque setting that is key to the
meaning of the two buildings facing 36th Street."

Civic groups generally supported the plan, though some expressed reservations about adding the cube
and moving the entrance. "We will miss the sense of having the privilege of entering a unique private
space," said Sandra Levine of the Historic Districts Council.

Earlier in the day, the commission created the Murray Hill Historic District, an irregular five-block
swath between 34th and 39th Streets, Park and Lexington Avenues, filled with 19th- and early
20th-century row houses, as well as the Church of the New Jerusalem at 112 East 35th Street.

Calling it a "remarkably cohesive enclave possessing a distinct sense of place," Sherida E. Paulsen, the
commission chairwoman, confessed that she was surprised to learn last year that it was not already a
historic district.

[Kris]

http://194.185.232.3/works/065/index.asp

[chris]

Thank you for sharing Stern. I have a magazine somewhere that has an article about this. I forgot about this project. I think it is Archit (ecture Magazine). I'll try to remember to look for it this week end. Thanks Christian for the RP Workshop link.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Through a plexiglass window on Madison Ave. It's still a hole in the ground, but a big one.

[Kris]

http://194.185.232.3/works/065/pictures.asp

[Kris]

[Kris]

[Kris]

The New Morgan Campus

[fioco]

Thanks for the excellent link, Kris (as usual!). It gives a nice tour of the new "campus." I had been unaware of the new 280-seat performance hall, plus a multi-media presentation center suitable for family-oriented education events. (The new campus also includes a restaurant and store, seemingly required these days.) Hopefully with the additions a new generation will discover the "new" Morgan.

[Kolbster]

nice pics...its looking nice

[Hof]

That must be the only block in Manhattan where you can dig without chopping into a nest of cables,steam pipes,water mains or subway tunnels.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Those utilities usually run under streets.

[Kris]

[RedFerrari360f1]

That was quick.

[Kris]

February 12, 2006
Streetscapes | 36th Street and Madison Avenue
A Private Library That Became a Public Treasure
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY


J. P. Morgan, in a photo taken about 1902.


The body of J. P. Morgan being taken from the Morgan Library after his death in 1913, top, and the nearly finished renovation of what is now the library complex. In April, the wraps will come off the complex, whose buildings range from 1850's brownstone to 2000's plate glass.

IN April, the wraps will come off the massive renovation of the Morgan Library complex, an eclectic jumble of buildings — from 1850's brownstone to 2000's plate glass — on Madison Avenue from 36th to 37th Street. Hidden away on 36th Street off Madison is what started it all: J. Pierpont Morgan's gemlike private library and gallery, built in 1906 all for himself.

By the 1880's, Morgan was one of the important names on Wall Street, but unlike other millionaires he settled for a second-hand mansion at the northeast corner of 36th and Madison, one of the three houses built by the Phelps and Dodge families on the blockfront three decades earlier.

Morgan gradually acquired other buildings in the area and ultimately controlled two-thirds of the block, as well as neighboring properties.

Around 1900, he conceived the idea of a private library to contain his growing collection of books, drawings, manuscripts and other treasures.

For land just off the corner facing 36th Street, Morgan first retained the architect Whitney Warren, who with his partner, Charles Wetmore, was later involved in the design of Grand Central Terminal.

The forthcoming "The Architecture of Warren & Wetmore" by Peter Pennoyer and Anne Walker (W. W. Norton, 2006) shows Warren's design for the library — a round, exuberant World's Fair-type pavilion with an ornate dome.

Warren's confection was too sweet for the taciturn financier, and Morgan soon turned to the scholarly, reserved Charles McKim, of McKim, Mead & White.

McKim produced one of the signature buildings of his career, a magnificently discreet single-story facade of Tennessee marble with an inset loggia, built at a cost of $1.5 million.

The building has a split character — one part dominated by delicate relief sculpture, the other massive and unyielding, abetted by great stones, laid without mortar.

According to Leland Roth's book "McKim, Mead & White, Architects" (Harper & Row, 1983), McKim had noticed that the stone of the Erechtheum, on the Acropolis in Athens, was laid without mortar, and he convinced Morgan that the $50,000 extra cost for mortarless work would be worth the result — reducing the size of the joints to a minimum.

McKim also called for masonry minus mortar, and the original stones were so closely spaced that it was impossible to insert a knife blade between them.

The library was completed in 1906, when a critic writing in The Architectural Review gave it the guarded praise of "icy and exquisite."

An account published in The New York Times in 1908 called it a "bookman's paradise," adding that it was "the most carefully, jealously guarded treasure house in the world."

The Times listed a wide span of library material, from ancient Egypt to Emile Zola, including William Blake's original drawings for his edition of the "Book of Job"; a Percy Bysshe Shelley notebook; originals of poems by Robert Burns; a Charles Dickens manuscript of "A Christmas Carol"; 30 shelves of Bibles; and manuscripts for George Sand, William Makepeace Thackeray, Lord Byron, Charlotte Brontë and nine of Sir Walter Scott's novels, including "Ivanhoe."

Morgan did not ask for any aboveground connection between his house and the library, and there was only a subsurface tunnel. Brian Regan, deputy director of the Morgan Library, said the tunnel is of common finish, like a service area, so perhaps Morgan simply walked outside when he wanted to go next door to look over his treasures.

Morgan died in 1913, leaving an estate of $68 million. His body, covered with a blanket of roses, lay in the west room of the library until it was taken out the double doors to a hearse on 36th Street.

In 1924, J. Pierpont Morgan Jr. made the library and its contents a public institution with a $1.5 million endowment, but The Times cautioned: "The library will be maintained, therefore, as a workplace for scholars and scientists. It will not be open to the curiosity seeker or the casual sightseer."

One provision of the son's gift was that the Pierpont Morgan Library — its official name — would not be consolidated with any other library for 100 years after his father's death in 1913.

Three years after the gift, the trustees demolished Morgan's home on the corner and soon replaced it with the sober but uninspiring structure now there, designed by Benjamin Wistar Morris. At that time a walkway connecting the two buildings was run across the back.

Now the Morgan Library's massive renovation project is nearly finished, with a gridlike infill of glass and steel meant to discreetly connect the 1906 library, the 1928 corner building at 36th Street and the 1850's brownstone on the corner at 37th, which will still be the bookstore.

What had been a disjointed maze will now be joined in the middle by a great glass atrium at the center of the plot. Visitors will again enter by the corner building, but then come to the center to a modern version of the Metropolitan Museum's Great Hall — a gathering place with a high ceiling.

Off to one side, entry to the 1906 library building will be as it was before, up a half flight of steps and in through the relatively tiny rear door that Morgan would have used if crossing through his backyard.

The restoration of the three old buildings in the complex is being overseen by the architects Beyer Blinder Belle, while the new elements of the Morgan are designed by Renzo Piano.

Mr. Regan said that the front door of the 1906 building will continue to be opened only "extremely rarely," because of environmental controls. Indeed, for decades any architectural pilgrim has been obliged to remain outside the ornamental bronze fence, 30 feet from the breathtakingly suave carving of the barrel vault and other areas in the loggia.

For the moment, it is still necessary to bring binoculars. But Mr. Regan said that after the Morgan Library reopens, it will "experiment" with opening the garden facing 36th Street, offering even the casual sightseer a close-up view of this extraordinary work.

E-mail: streetscapes@nytimes.com

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company