|
| |

| Top Ten
NYC Architecture |
top ten New York Museums |
|
| |
|
|
| |
For a more complete list, see
Museum,Gallery,Library
etc. |
|
| 1 |
American
Museum of Natural History
|
|
 |
The Natural History Museum is one of the most famous tourist attractions in New York City. The architecture alone makes the museum stand out; it’s a huge, sprawling stone building that reflects an eclectic mix of design styles. The Central Park West entrance has towering white columns and a bronze statue of President Theodore Roosevelt on horseback, other parts of the building look Medieval, with towers like on a storybook castle, and the Rose Center is as modern as a building can get, a glass box with the new Hayden sphere floating in the center.
The most important thing to know when planning a visit is that the museum is huge so plan to do a lot of walking and stair climbing. There are four floors of gallery space and the building is spread over an area of several city blocks. Inside there are 42 permanent exhibits and several temporary ones covering everything in creation from the beginning of time to the present, every discipline of human science: biology, ecology, zoology, geology, astronomy, and anthropology. The museum presents its collection of millions of artifacts with detailed information about the cultural, scientific, or historical importance of the pieces. It’s quite possible to spend hours just in the Halls for Asian, African & South American Peoples. |
|
| |
|
|
| 2 |
Museum of Modern Art
|
|
 |
|
architect
|
Goodwin and Edward
Durell Stone ,
additions and alterations: Philip Johnson
Associates (architect) and James
Fanning (landscape architect) [1954, 1964], further additions and
alterations: Cesar Pelli & Associates
(design architects) and Edward
Durell Stone Associates (associate architects) [1985] |
|
location
|
11
West 53rd Street, bet. Fifth and Sixth Aves. |
|
date
|
1939 |
|
style
|
International Style II
|
|
construction
|
steel, glass |
|
type
|
Museum |
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is a preeminent art museum located in
Midtown Manhattan in New York City, USA, on 53rd Street, between Fifth
and Sixth Avenues. It has been singularly important in developing and
collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most
influential museum of modern art in the world.[1] The museum's
collection offers an unparalleled overview of modern and contemporary
art, [2] including works of architecture and design, drawings, painting,
sculpture, photography, prints, illustrated books, film, and electronic
media.
MoMA's library and archives hold over 300,000 books, artist books, and
periodicals, as well as individual files on more than 70,000 artists.
The archives contain primary source material related to the history of
modern and contemporary art. |
|
| |
|
|
| 3 |
Metropolitan
Museum of Art |
|
 |
|
architect
|
1880- original portion (now
mostly covered by additions) Calvert Vaux
and Jacob Wrey Mould,
1902-Richard
Morris Hunt designed the central pavilion and the neoclassical facade
1911-McKim, Mead
and White designed the north and south wings
since 1975 - Six additional wings, designed by the architectural firm of Roche
Dinkeloo
major wings by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey
Mould, 1870-80; Thomas Weston with Arthur L. Tuckerman, associate,
1883-88; Arthur L. Tuckerman, 1890-94; Richard Morris Hunt, 1894-95;
Richard Howland Hunt and George B. Post, 1895-1902; McKim, Mead &
White, 1904-26; Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo Associates, 1967-90
|
|
location
|
5th Avenue at 82nd St. |
|
date
|
1880 |
|
style
|
Neoclassical |
|
construction
|
stone |
|
type
|
Museum |
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, often referred to simply as "the Met",
is one of the world's largest and most important art museums. The main
building is located on the eastern edge of Central Park in New York
City, New York, United States, along what is known as Museum Mile. It
was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1986. The Met has a much
smaller second location at "The Cloisters," featuring medieval art.
|
|
| |
|
|
| 4 |
Whitney
Museum of American Art |
|
 |
The Whitney Museum of American Art owes its striking granite presence at
the southeast corner of Madison Avenue and 75th Street to the
Hungarian-born, Bauhaus-trained architect Marcel Breuer
(1902-1981). To design a third home for the Museum—which had gradually
migrated northward from its original location on West 8th Street to West
54th Street—Breuer worked with Hamilton Smith, creating a strong
modernist statement in a neighborhood of traditional limestone,
brownstone, and brick row houses and postwar apartment buildings.
Considered somber, heavy, and even brutal at the time of its completion in
1966 ("an inverted Babylonian ziggurat," according to one
critic), Breuer's building is now recognized as daring, strong, and
innovative. It has won landmark status, and has come to be identified with
the Whitney's own uninhibited approach to twentieth-century art.
|
|
| |
|
|
| 5 |
Solomon
R. Guggenheim Museum |
|
 |
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, founded in 1937, is a modern art
museum located on the Upper East Side in New York City. It is the
best-known of several museums owned and/or operated by the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Foundation, and is often called simply The Guggenheim. It is
one of the best-known museums in New York City.
Originally called "The Museum of Non-Objective Painting," the Guggenheim
was founded to showcase avant-garde art by early modernists such as
Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian. It moved to its present location,
at the corners of 89th Street and Fifth Avenue (overlooking Central
Park), in 1959, when Frank Lloyd Wright's design for the site was
completed.
The distinctive building, Wright's last major work, instantly polarized
architecture critics, though today it is widely revered. From the
street, the building looks approximately like a white ribbon curled into
a cylindrical stack, slightly wider at the top than the bottom. Its
appearance is in sharp contrast to the more typically boxy Manhattan
buildings that surround it, a fact relished by Wright who claimed that
his museum would make the nearby Metropolitan Museum of Art "look like a
Protestant barn."
Internally, the viewing gallery forms a gentle spiral from the ground
level up to the top of the building. Paintings are displayed along the
walls of the spiral and also in viewing rooms found at stages along the
way. |
|
| |
|
|
| 6 |
Cooper-Hewitt
Design Museum |
|
 |
|
architect
|
Babb, Cook & Willard |
|
location
|
2
East 91st, At Fifth Ave |
|
date
|
1899-1902
(former
Carnegie Mansion) |
|
style
|
Beaux-Arts |
|
construction
|
Steel frame, brick and limestone |
|
type
|
House,
Museum |
Cooper-Hewitt is the Smithsonian Institution's
National Museum of Design. Truly impressive in scope and purpose,
this Museum, housed in the landmark Carnegie Mansion, includes 11,000
square feet of gallery space devoted to changing exhibitions that examine
compelling issues of design, displaying its own collections as well as
loans from public and private sources.
The Museum preserves, documents, and
expands a collection of nearly 250,000 works in such fields as rare books,
drawings and prints, textiles, wall coverings, furniture, ceramics, glass,
metalwork, and jewelry. Areas of interest include graphic design,
industrial design, and architecture.
The perspective is international, and the
Museum's holdings encompass both historical and contemporary design and
decoration. A democratic regard for mass-produced as well as one-of-a-kind
objects lends a unique character to the collections.
|
|
| |
|
|
| 7 |
ELLIS
ISLAND |
|
 |
Ellis Island, at the mouth of the New York Harbor, was at one time the
main entry facility for immigrants entering the United States from
January 1, 1892 until November 12, 1954. It is wholly in the possession
of the Federal government as a part of Statue of Liberty National
Monument and is under the jurisdiction of the US National Park Service.
It is situated in New York City and Jersey City, New Jersey.
Ellis Island was the subject of a border dispute between New York State
and New Jersey. According to the United States Census Bureau, the
island, which was largely artificially created through the landfill
process, has an official land area of 129,619 square meters, or 32
acres, more than 83 percent of which lies in the city of Jersey City.
The natural portion of the island, lying in New York City, is 21,458
square meters (5.3 acres), and is completely surrounded by the
artificially created portion. For New York State tax purposes it is
assessed as Manhattan Block 1, Lot 201. Since 1998, it also has a tax
number assigned by the state of New Jersey. |
|
| |
|
|
| 8 |
The Cloisters |
|
 |
|
architect
|
Charles Collens (1873–1956) |
|
location
|
northern
Manhattan's Fort Tryon Park |
|
date
|
1938 |
|
style
|
medieval
French cloisters |
|
construction
|
stone |
|
type
|
Museum |
The
Cloisters—described by Germain Bazin, former director of the Musée du
Louvre in Paris, as "the crowning achievement of American museology"—is
the branch of the Metropolitan Museum devoted to the art and architecture
of medieval Europe. Located on four acres overlooking the Hudson River in
northern Manhattan's Fort Tryon Park, the building incorporates elements
from five medieval French cloisters—quadrangles enclosed by a roofed or
vaulted passageway, or arcade—and from other monastic sites in southern
France. Three of the cloisters reconstructed at the branch museum feature
gardens planted according to horticultural information found in medieval
treatises and poetry, garden documents and herbals, and medieval works of
art, such as tapestries, stained-glass windows, and column capitals.
Approximately five thousand works of art from medieval Europe, dating from
about A.D. 800 with particular emphasis on the twelfth through fifteenth
century, are exhibited in this unique and sympathetic context.
The new museum building was designed by
Charles Collens (1873–1956), the architect of New York City's Riverside
Church, in a simplified, paraphrased medieval style, incorporating and
reconstructing the cloister elements salvaged by Barnard. Joseph Breck
(1885–1933), a curator of decorative arts and assistant director of the
Metropolitan, and James J. Rorimer (1905–1966), who would later be named
director, were primarily responsible for the interior. Balancing Collens's
interpretation with strict attention to historical accuracy, Breck and
Rorimer created in the galleries a clear and logical flow from the
Romanesque (ca. 1000–ca. 1150) through the Gothic period (ca.
1150–1520). The Cloisters was formally dedicated on May 10, 1938. The
Treasury, containing sumptuous objects created for liturgical
celebrations, personal devotions, and secular uses, was renovated in 1988.
The galleries in which the seven tapestries depicting "The Hunt of
the Unicorn" are hung were refurbished in 1999. |
|
| |
|
|
| 9 |
The
Jewish Museum |
|
 |
|
architect
|
C. P. H. Gilbert |
|
location
|
1109
Fifth Ave At 92nd Street. |
|
date
|
1909, expansion 1993 Roche
Dinkeloo |
|
style
|
François I chateau |
|
construction
|
limestone on loadbearing masonary |
|
type
|
Museum |
"Apparently, Felix and Frieda Warburg, prominent members of New York's German-Jewish aristocracy, were so impressed with the François I
chateaux that C. P. H. Gilbert had designed for the Fletchers [at 2 East
79th Street] and Woolworths [formerly at 990 Fifth Avenue] farther south of Fifth Avenue, that they commissioned a similar house for themselves. For the Warburgs, Gilbert created a house that, in its basic form, is similar to the Fletchers', but is somewhat more refined. The Warburg House is more artfully massed, with a subtle balance of window and door openings and projecting and receding planes, but it is less whimsical than the earlier dwelling, lacking much of the droll detail that so enlivens the 79th Street house." |
|
| |
|
|
| 10 |
El
Museo del Barrio |
|
 |
|
architect
|
|
|
location
|
1230
Fifth Ave, Bet. E104 & E105. |
|
date
|
c. 1915 |
|
style
|
neo-classical |
|
construction
|
brick and limestone cladding on steel frame |
|
type
|
Museum |
El Museo del Barrio was founded in 1969 by a group of Puerto Rican
parents, educators, artists and community activists in East Harlem's
Spanish-speaking el barrio, the neighborhood that extends from 96th
Street to the Harlem River and from Fifth Avenue to the East River on
Manhattan's Upper East Side. The contexts of El Museo's founding were
the national civil rights movement and, in the New York City art world,
the campaign that called for major art institutions to decentralize
their collections and to represent a variety of non-European cultures
in their collections and programs.
From the outset, El Museo defined itself as an educational institution
and a place of cultural pride and self-discovery for the founding
Puerto Rican community. Initially El Museo operated in a public school
classroom as an adjunct to the local school district; then, between
1969 and l976, El Museo moved to a series of storefronts on Third and
Lexington Avenues, in the heart of el barrio. In 1977 El Museo found a
permanent home in the spacious, neo-classical Heckscher Building at
1230 Fifth Avenue.
|
|
| |
|
|
| 11 |
Museum
of the City of New York |
|
 |
|
architect
|
Joseph J. Freedlander |
|
location
|
1220-1227 Fifth Avenue, Bet
East 103rd & East 104th. |
|
date
|
1928-30 |
|
style
|
neo-Federal
|
|
construction
|
red brick, limestone |
|
type
|
Museum |
This Georgian-Colonial style building,
designed by Joseph H. Freedlander, was built for the Museum in 1932. The
Museum was incorporated as a non-profit organization in 1923; its previous
home was Gracie Mansion. |
|
| |
|
|
|