A view of the Met Breuer by night, featuring new signage and a touch of red beneath the eave of its main entrance—a nod to the museum's institution-wide rebranding announced last week.
It's a big month for New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. On March 18, the nation's largest art museum will host the grand opening of its third and newest location, the Met Breuer, housed in the Brutalist landmark that was vacated by the Whitney Museum of American Art in October 2014. Boldly named to pay homage to its architect—the Hungarian-born, Bauhaus-trained Marcel Breuer, who completed the structure in 1966—the much-anticipated expansion comes on the tails of several new updates being rolled out at the museum.
Last week, it announced its new logo—a scarlet-red logotype of stacked and compressed, serif letters spelling out its popular and abbreviated name, The Met—as well as the beta version of their new site. Described by director Thomas P. Campbell as the museum's "fourth space," the digital overhaul serves to clearly unite information on the institution's news and programs across its three physical locations (its main branch, the Cloisters, and the Met Breuer). While the bold updates have been met with mixed reception from the public, however, visitors are less likely to pick up on any visible wild cards at the opening this month. A peek of red greets visitors at the front entrance, where an accent has been added to the front awning, and banners with the institution's new logos have just gone up earlier this week. Inside, however, fans of Breuer will be pleased to find that most everything has been left intact—and polished.
"When the museum took over the building, one of the first things we wanted to do was see it as an artwork or a sculpture that we were trying to restore," says Beatrice Gailiee, who joined the Met as its first-ever curator focused on contemporary architecture and design. "And that means basically bringing it down to the essence of trying to scrub things down, removing accrued dirt, replacing lightbulbs that didn't work properly—all of those things—but also retaining the burnishing of the lift doors. There were people scrubbing details with toothbrushes, scrubbing and scrubbing, taking samples: the full audit."
With an eye towards both conserving and restoring the beloved Brutalist masterpiece as an acquisition itself, the museum carried out the extensive efforts in partnership with New York firm Beyer Blinder Belle, which specializes in preserving historic structures. Minor changes to the interior include a clearer entrance lobby. Galilee says a soffit, formerly hanging over the coatcheck area, was removed to reveal Breuer's original grid of lighting on the ceiling; the bookstore was also relocated to the fifth floor, where a new cafe will also be introduced. These small but notable gestures serve to greatly clarify the ground-floor, arguably the most-trafficked area of the museum at any given time.
Program-wise, the Met Breuer will host the institution's expanded focus on contemporary and modern art from the 20th-century to the present, an initiative led by Sheena Wagstaff, who was tapped to join the museum four years ago, following a stint as chief curator of London's Tate Modern. The inaugural lineup of exhibitions include a "sonic experience" by John Luther Adams, who has composed a nine-minute piece—free for download—that has been timed for visitors to listen to from their walk to and from the Met's main branch and the Met Breuer. This November, Galilee (who is currently at work on this summer's Roof Garden commission at the Met's main branch) will also mount "Inhabiting Marcel Breuer's Architecture," featuring newly commissioned photographs of four of the architect's iconic works.
View the slideshow above for a sneak peek of the new Met Breuer.
