A Light Touch in the Frick Expansion

The new discreet peer structure - but is not looming - on the manor of Henry Clay Frick in 1914.

The new discreet storing peers – but are not looming – above the manor of Henry Clay Frick in 1914.
Photo: Studio Nicholas Venezia

In a word: phew.

More than a decade after having declared its intention to undergo a major reconstruction and five years after the start of treatment, the money is back, intact and resplendent. I feared that all the DIY would leave the great lady of the mansion museums as a movie star whose cosmetic procedures had been wrong: recognizable and rejuvenated but in a way horribly. Instead, the architect Annabelle Selldorf and his business carried out a therapeutic intervention, helping the museum to grow, to mature and to adapt without rejecting its past. The 1914 Beaux-Arts manor by Carrère and Hastings, piled up to moldings with Renaissance masterpieces until the beginning of the 20th century, was to work better for visitors and for art. He also had to develop, which was the controversial part. He did not Need to produce the type of experience of a commercial museum, with reception center, laudable atrium and multi-screen film, which has attracted so many institutions. And so Seldorf has succeeded in a paradoxical mission: to transform a beloved sanctuary while leaving it essentially the same.

70th Street Facade with a new wing hidden behind.
Photo: Studio Nicholas Venezia

This is not the first time that the building has been in volume. John Pope interpreted a similar feat in the 1930s when he transformed the house of Henry Clay and Adelaide Frick into an institution, bordering East 71st Street with a high and windowless wall that ended in his new art library and enclosing the central garden field under a barrel of glass. Every few decades have made another series of modifications. But even after all this, in 2020, the building still had a second floor of secret rooms where the FRICK family was sleeping, bathed and dressed and museum staff now crouching. Over time, the spaces had followed the path of all the offices, their rather graduate opulence has downgraded to a world of flickering screens and tangled cables. The invitation of the public upstairs has created an intimidating and costly set of tasks: restoring furniture, match lost and faded wall coverings, replace all wiring and climate, add bathrooms, improve the conservation laboratory, replace elevators and – the most difficult of all – find new staff districts. When you change a wrapped and original manor from the fifth avenue, you start with the desire to lift a velvet rope, and very soon you tend a whole new structure in the middle of the block. But here is the miracle: unless you are looking for it, you never know it.

The new addition is about as erased as a limestone wing can be. To see what Seldorf has worked, go east in front of the museum entrance on East 70th Street and stood in front of the closed garden. Behind this small plot of a clever nature increases a pair of four -story sober blocks linked by a glass wall connector. On the one hand, four other floors rise to a narrow mini-turn, a slight strengthening of the adjacent art library. The addition does not aspire to novelty or imitated a great age, without balustrades, pilasters, dentil cornices and all other surface frostings that the beautiful-art architects considered essential. Instead, he moved comfortably in the horizon, quietly doing things. Here, inoffensiveness is a major achievement. To build a beloved benchmark in a historic district, under the anxious eye of the conservatives, and slide in 27,000 additional square feet of new, practically unnoticed constructions – it is the work of an inverted cat burglar.

The new reception room with its ornate tailor -made lanterns.
Photo: Studio Nicholas Venezia

The most obvious virtuosity begins inside, and there too, it never becomes stronger than the piano mezzo. Enter as before through the Carrère and Hastings arched door (now accessible by a beautiful ramp as well as the renovated steps) and go through the intact vestibule. There, you arrive in a reception room added in the 1970s in a neo-Neoclassic style memorably yellow and now redone the fresh gray stone. Selldorf has widened the part, lowered the ceiling to take into account another level above and created a new route to the Galleries on the ground floor. This is also the design made with a scalpel and sutures, and the scars do not show. The French vaulted doors still face the garden page by Russell, which has been torn and reinstalled on a new underground auditorium.

The new underground auditorium.
Photo: Studio Nicholas Venezia

In the reception room, Seldorf allowed himself to flourish – no, two – of personality, temporarily putting his coldly modernist side and engaging in an old -fashioned sensuality. The suspension of the ceiling chests are two rows of custom -made hexagonal lanterns shaded in murano glass. And at one end of the room, a staircase dressed in marble so richly veined, it looks like Halva de cocoa and pistachio promises delights on the second floor. These touches are reminders that architecture is a sensual art, that spaces designed to maintain flowing crowds can also provide pleasures to savor during a break. Under the ground, the doors of the bathrooms are framed in the same blue marble Breccia Aurora as the staircase, ensuring that even the most banal moment can provide poetry.

The new staircase of Breccia Aurora Blue Marble. Photos: Studio Nicholas Venezia.

These are expensive forms of generosity. The total renovation invoice (including the three -year stay in the Breuer building on Madison Avenue) reached $ 330 million, much more than it was to build the manor in the first place, even for an inflation value of a century. But then, the cost is part of the point. Longtime visitors will find their old beloved Holbeins installed in a familiar baronial luxury, the garden is always a serene retreat of white marble garnished with greenery, the walls of the galleries dressed in new silk and wool weaving to recreate their original splendor. The money is a temple of tangible, where visitors can commune with highly missing materials in their ordinary life: oil painting, brass, porcelain, damassez and old wood.

The view of the garden.
Photo: Studio Nicholas Venezia

This principle extends following new spaces that have been inserted, between and in parallel with previous iterations. On the second floor, Seldorf has created a procession of the light boutique via Skylit Hall in BowerLike Green Vestibule with a coffee that packs more design in one room than most contemporary skyscrapers. Green leather benches designed by Bryan O’Sullivan, the selldorf glass chanders suspended from plaster stars, a dark wooden bar with marble counters at one end, large tanned windows facing south, a marble tiles of marble tiles on the ground, and a fragmentation painted with a Chinese landscape a Chinese landscape. Remember the mass which is delighted with the mass which leads a country of Chinese land – there is a landscape of Darren which is delighted with a Chinese landscape country. On Panini becomes an aesthetic experience.

Conservation in a work building always involves compromises; The art of the latter lies in obtaining the richest result of the smallest betrayal. The FRICK’s first renovation plan, from 2014, would have swallowed the page garden, which had been installed as a temporary reserved space for future expansion and to which the public could not access anyway. The conservatives ran to the defense of the garden and the museum abandoned the design. Finally, Seldorf sacrificed the circular music room of Pope, replacing it with a trio of temporary exhibition galleries. The loss would be sadder if it represented the victory of the opportunity on grace; Instead, he prioritizes a kind of artistic experience (a Vermeer show, for example) on another (a concert of acoustically doubtful chamber music). In fact, Selldorf even eliminated the need for this choice by passing its modernist sensitivity under the ground in this auditorium, which has a promising crystalline acoustics, 220 comfortable leather armchairs and a shape like the interior of an egg. This is the kind of space that makes music for what galleries for art do: making you feel its physical presence and sustainable warmth.