Metropolitan Museum of Art to tear down a section built in 1987 and rebuild

It's generally accepted that these naming rights age out in the large donor circles.

It’s logical, and very smart. They have built up a large collection of modern and contemporary art with no place to properly display it. Now they will.

Your premise fails dramatically, as the entire history of the Met is based on expansion, replacement and/or re-use of space; this next stage is entirely consistent with that history.

This is a big problem for art museums worldwide: far more art in the collection than any display space will allow for.

You can't expect donations to flow if you're not spending the boodle. A fat bank account doesn't doesn't square.

It may be logical to build a new wing, but it still a failure of design and foresight that one of the most recently-constructed parts of the museum needs to be torn down and rebuilt.

Media coverage is largely ignoring this—celebrating the new.

It’s perfect, let’s break it

I have to say, the Rembrandt paintings are displayed in gloom. Even he recommended his pictures be displayed in strong light.

There is no family to make a complaint—she’s long dead, the husband is long-dead, and they were childless. No one will miss her name on that…it’s all over the place.

It’s for collections that didn’t exist back then. It’s hardly the first the Met has ripped up something and started over. Get over it.

Lincoln Center arranged for the Avery Fischer family to agree to the name change. They got a $15 million check..

Bullshit. The Wing was built to house modern and contemporary art. They just fucked it up.

Grouchy grouchy! More art on display is a GOOD thing.

I’m not saying it’s a bad thing to display more art. I’m saying it’s pretty poor planning to have to tear down a relatively recent new wing in order to do it. Tremendous waste.

What c nasty piece of work you are, r8.

I detest cheap sentiment.

And whst the hell am I? Chopped liver?

There's always the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts museum Colonial Williamsburg. It's actually quite lovely.

The problem when they do things like this is it makes donors less likely to donate big sums, knowing that their wings can be taken down.

Is there anyone who works in development at this level here who can speak to this? I feel like we're a bunch of queens who think we know *just* enough, but may not know how this all really works.

Yes—that’s why they raised a half billion dollars.

Unless otherwise expressly stipulated, having your name on the building doesn’t mean it can’t go away later. Don’t be dumb.

The name game is flawed, especially since some wealthy donors will be turned off by feathering the nest of "competitors" with their own art donations or cash.

It took them a very long time to raise the money. This has been in the works for a decade.

Original announcement

^ I wouldn't be caught dead in a jeans dress. Who is this parvenue?

[quote] When the Wallace Wing was built at a cost of $26 million, it provided the Met with 40,000 square feet of galleries — more than the Whitney’s 25,400 square feet of exhibition space at the time, and the Guggenheim’s 38,500. Lila Acheson Wallace, a Reader’s Digest founder and major patron of the museum who died in 1984, donated $11 million to the project.

Are these two rival branches of the Wing family in competition with each other?

[quote]I’m not saying it’s a bad thing to display more art. I’m saying it’s pretty poor planning to have to tear down a relatively recent new wing in order to do it.

Their modern wing as it stands now is horrendous, so I'm delighted they are doing it over. Now seems as good a time as any to fix an '80s fuck up.

I'm sure the architect of the 80's wing would have chimed in if this pissed them off, given they've been planning this for so long.

R28: Here is a 2014 quote from the architect of the Wallace Wing. It seems he never liked it either.

[quote]The Wallace Wing’s original architect, Kevin Roche of Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates — who has designed the Met’s additions since 1967 — said the wing was always a problem. “It really never got built properly,” said Mr. Roche, 92, in an interview. “I was never very happy with what happened.”

[quote]“There wasn’t a clear program,” he added, “and it kind of just got put together in pieces.”

Thank you—a ten year old article which fully refutes OP’s lame arguments. Well done.

Umm. I posted the article you are praising, and it does not refute my arguments at all. Obviously, the original wing was a disaster. My point is that the fact that they have to tear down a new wing and replace it at more that 20 times the cost a few decades later is a major fuck up which is being largely swept under the rug.

It's a jobs program!

Your point is boring the rest of us. Move on.

You might be credible If you hadn’t posted 5 times in my thread.

Excellent. I knew it was in the works but am glad that it has (more or less) an all clear. The architect Frida Escobdeo is a fine choice. What I know of her work has an elegance and an almost tactile or experiential sense that goes beyond the purely visual, I expect there will be lovely, refined spaces and also a strong sense of sequence of space, all with attention to purpose.-- all things important in such a program, particulalry for the Met which shoehorns so many collections and dedicated wings and styles of architecture into one mammoth puzzle box.

The 1987 addition was not a shining moment for the museum, neither architecturally nor programmatically. The spaces are more shopping mall than elegant, and everything deferred to the collection which might have been fine. It will not be missed. The Met has a series of constant battles: to display more art and objects; to control circulation in an intelligent way; and to delicately court a queue of prestige donors megadonors against the larger demands of the whole museum (naming rights and the diesire for perpetual remembrance.) Then there is the requirement not to compete too wildly with the earlier phases of architecture and to design a timid exterior not to (further) outrage the park enthusiasts who might be happier if the building were torn down (so relentlessly unhappy are they with having a tiny chunk 'stolen' from an edge in an 843-acre park in the middle of the city.

[quote]The problem when they do things like this is it makes donors less likely to donate big sums, knowing that their wings can be taken down.

No. The Met has the great fortune to have donors lined up to cajole, to strong-arm, to do all sorts to a short-term lease on perpetuity. At this point everyone accepts, as R1 wrote, that a gift or naming opportunity to the Met comes with ever shorter leases to personal branding rights. I had three friends and acquaintances who used to love to toy with the Met and umpteen other museums, but the Met especially, to see how much they could squeeze out of their offer of a donation of a collection and a big donation - not wing-size naming opportunities, but a corner of a wing, maybe a few rooms. They played the game for ages as many serious collectors used to do, but all gave on on the big prize, the Met, simply because the stakes were a leagure above theirs and the promise of perpuity, even at that level, was frankly dismissed. It's a huge act of vanity for a collector to snag his own wing, or library, or even aiming lower for a new museum. Before the stakes got so high it kept a decent chunk of museum staff busy courting potential donors. Eventually, any but the very biggest of the big fish donors had to scout for smaller opportunities to get any kind of assurance that the donation and naming-op would last more than a few years beyond the reading of their wills. The days of robber baron size and quality collections and engraved names carved in stone in Roman letters might last for generations beyond their death. The days of being able to exert great control over museums is gone. Even more gone is expecting that your gift and name recogniton will last more than a generation, if that.

I spent my boodle on the Roxy dancefloor every Saturday night until they closed!

My thread! Says Op

🫵🏼🥴

How the hell is that blocky piece of crap going to cost half a billion?

It looks great. I can't wait. I love the Met.

More pics

Anyone who has actually been to the Met knows that wing is ugly ass.

A lot of the late Met’s 20th construction was a failure. The Michael Rockefeller Wing (1982_just in front of the Wallace Wing, has had extensive renovations. At least they didn’t have to tear it down.

[quote] [Curator]LaGamma described the previous design of the Rockefeller wing as “a big, gloomy, kind of modernist space” that resembled a Soho loft that had a “weird light grid” and “resembled a bit of a cave”. It was also purpose-built for a much smaller collection at only 3,000 works. The wing’s original interior design also had in-gallery storage, which meant “hundreds of ceramic vessels” being stored in cupboards taking up valuable space and not on display. “We now have only space devoted to prime exhibition, and that allows us to really, in some cases, exhibit more works, and in other cases, give more space to the works that we’re presenting,” LaGamma said during the one-hour press tour.

NY Times:

[quote]Joanne Pillsbury, the curator of the Arts of the Ancient Americas, said she was excited by the new sloped glass wall on the south facade, adjacent to Central Park (the previous glass wall did not protect the art from UV rays, so the museum had to keep the blinds down). “It’s an exciting opportunity for us because so many of the works in the collection of the Arts of the Ancient Americas were works that were meant to be seen in daylight,” she said. “And they really come alive in a new way in natural light.”

Aren't the Tangs the benefactors of the annex to the New York Historical, which began life as an entire LGBTQ museum, now whittled down to one fucking floor of the neighborhood-destructive debacle?

OP please resubmit your post as Metropolitan Museum to tear out that BITCH of a wing and put an inverted ziggurat where an inverted ziggurat out to be

lol R44

Off topic but you really wonder why Paris hasn't done something about the Montparnasse Tower, even though it's privately owned and asbestos is a big issue. They could demolish a couple of levels every decade or so and eventually bring it down to half its size.

Trump coloring book wing coming.

Best view in Paris, that Tour Montparnasse.

[quote] Lila Acheson Wallace Wing

Did she remarry to an Asian?

Can you just imagine 😱 the garbage they’re going to put in there?

I hope it annoys the fuck out of you, r50.