A nook of New York hasn’t appeared fairly itself for the reason that Frick Assortment shuttered throughout Covid for the architectural equal of a full-body spa remedy.
For some time the museum that luxuriates in Henry Clay Frick’s Beaux-Arts mansion on Fifth Avenue decamped with its previous masters and different artwork to Marcel Breuer’s former Whitney Museum just a few blocks away. Seeing Bellini’s “St. Francis within the Desert” in a Brutalist constructing felt like coming throughout your highschool chemistry instructor on spring break in Cocoa Seaside.
Subsequent month the Frick reopens after its $220 million growth and refurbishment. Fretful preservationists have been pinging my inbox for years, venting their anxieties about tampering with one of many metropolis’s architectural treasures.
I bear good tidings. The growth is about as delicate and deft as one may hope for. At moments, as in a voluptuous new marble staircase and ethereal auditorium, it approximates poetry. It most likely gained’t quiet all of the critics. Grumblers will probably be grumblers. But it surely does what was supposed. It strikes the Frick squarely into the twenty first century and seamlessly solves multifarious issues. And the place it counts, it leaves effectively sufficient alone.
The architect is the German-born, New York-based Annabelle Selldorf. She and her colleagues at Selldorf Architects paired with Beyer Blinder Belle, one other New York agency, and with the backyard designer Lynden B. Miller. As of late, Selldorf is a go-to architect for thorny initiatives like this. In London she is updating a hotly contested wing of the Nationwide Gallery designed within the Nineties by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.
Frick’s mansion, accomplished in 1914, was designed by the agency of Carrère and Hastings, which gave New York the forty second Avenue Library. In 2001, Selldorf made her bones changing one other Carrère and Hastings landmark from 1914, the onetime Vanderbilt mansion, additional up Fifth Avenue. With care and creativity, she morphed it into Ronald Lauder’s state-of-the-art Neue Galerie.
Increasing the Frick was a trickier activity. It necessitated sacrifice. For starters, Selldorf has demolished the Frick’s beloved music room that John Russell Pope, the august architect for the Jefferson Memorial, added when he oversaw the Frick’s mansion-to-museum transformation in the course of the Nineteen Thirties. Pope doubled the constructing’s footprint.
Like others, I’m unhappy to lose the music room. Through the years, as opponents of its loss have taken to stating, it had change into New York’s model of a Nineteenth-century salon. Reality be informed, with 149 seats it was too small for a lot of occasions, and its acoustics had been mediocre. It additionally occupied the best spot to place new galleries for non permanent exhibitions, which the Frick wanted and had been essential to Selldorf’s plan.
In order that’s what has occurred. Selldorf put in three new galleries.
To exchange the music room she excavated beneath the Frick’s seventieth Avenue backyard, designing a technologically up-to-date, 218-seat auditorium, formed a bit like the within of a clamshell. Previous the brand new foyer, by a low vestibule, round a curved wooden wall product of fluted walnut, you abruptly enter a surprisingly mild and roomy corridor, as white as an working theater, mildly erotic with its curvaceous plaster partitions.
She then turned to the Frick’s reception corridor from the Seventies, which by no means fairly labored. On crowded days, gaining entry to the museum may put you in thoughts of LaGuardia Airport on Thanksgiving eve. A convoluted ticket and coat test association created logjams and funneled guests into useless ends.
Like a heart specialist, Selldorf has unclogged passageways, invented crafty strains of circulation and improved the reception corridor.
Its centerpiece is a showstopper: a brand new, cantilevered stairway, voluptuous and clad in veined, Breccia Aurora marble, decadent in a dolce vita form of approach. It nods to the grand staircase within the mansion. And it results in a brand new second ground that Selldorf has surgically inserted above the corridor to slot in a brand new reference to the mansion, a store and a 60-seat cafe (the Frick would be the final museum on earth that lacked one) overlooking the gated, seventieth Avenue backyard.
In 2014, the museum floated an earlier growth proposal by a special structure agency that imagined a blocky extension changing the backyard, which the British panorama architect Russell Web page designed when the reception corridor was constructed in the course of the Seventies. The Frick assumed on the time that the backyard would solely be non permanent, changed when the museum wanted to develop once more.
However with its reflecting pool, shaded pea gravel paths and wisteria, it was a Zenlike pause alongside the road and got here to be prized by New Yorkers as a kind of pocket-size serendipities of life within the metropolis. Preservationists had been aghast concerning the proposal to destroy it.
The Frick backed off. Two years later it employed Selldorf and dedicated to retaining the backyard.
That proved simpler mentioned than completed. Constructing the underground auditorium required ripping the backyard up, then replanting it. It’s nonetheless rising again. Selldorf treats the backyard with deference, organizing her largest, bulkiest addition — two new flooring above the place the music room was, adjoining an extension of Pope’s nine-floor library at 71st Avenue — to rigorously skirt the backyard’s north finish.
The addition repurposes a slim yard, previously hidden behind a backyard wall, the place the Frick stashed its garden mowers and air con models. A brand new training heart (one other first for the museum) occupies that area right this moment, with the cafe above.
Selldorf has then clad the entire puzzle-like addition in Indiana limestone, to match the mansion’s exterior and unify an finally anodyne facade. The addition steps a few ft again the place the cafe overlooks the backyard, finessing room for a row of hornbeams.
I used to be amongst those that urged the Frick again in 2014 to ditch the plan to demolish the backyard, and I wrote a column that handed alongside some different concepts then making the rounds amongst New York architects. These included swapping Pope’s music room for non permanent exhibition areas, excavating beneath the backyard to assemble one other auditorium and redoing the reception corridor by including one other ground.
Sharing obscure ideas from the peanut gallery ultimately resolves not one of the challenges of redesigning 87,000 sq. ft of intricate area. Concepts may be realized in another way and badly. Structure occurs within the trenches. Getting the Frick growth proper demanded one million advanced choices, as mundane however significant as selecting which forms of marble, among the many 138 differing types already within the constructing, ought to tile the reception corridor, and through which exact block sample. And it’s felt in gestures like that ledge for the hornbeams, whose delicate depth lends the backyard a vital whisper of respiratory room.
It entails connoisseurship, in different phrases, the inventory in commerce of the Frick. Shopping for artwork is one factor. Constructing a group just like the Frick’s is one other.
Credit score additionally goes to Ian Wardropper, the Frick director who oversaw the entire growth and simply retired final month. He was a gradual hand on the coronary heart of the museum. I discussed earlier that the renovation is aware of when to depart effectively sufficient alone. The enjoyment of visiting the Frick stays intact. The frisson of prowling round a robber baron’s stuffy home is unchanged.
Nothing is altered within the nice rooms of Titians and Fragonards, save for wall coverings of hand-woven French silk damask and velvet, which have been scrupulously, and at formidable price, changed. The Backyard Courtroom is similar however with cleaned skylights and a fountain that now works as Pope supposed for the primary time in residing reminiscence.
What’s new is that guests can, for the primary time, wander up the mansion’s grand staircase to the second ground and nostril across the Frick household’s former bedrooms, repurposed as galleries for Chinese language porcelain, Renaissance medals, Bouchers and Constables. What was a toilet is hung with French Rococo footage. The variety of objects on view from the everlasting assortment has doubled.
I stay up for when the backyard blooms.
Excellent news is in brief provide lately. The Frick reopens in mid-April. The town already feels lighter.
