The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has unveiled plans for a comprehensive redesign of the four-block-long outdoor plaza that runs in front of its landmark Fifth Avenue façade, from 80th to 84th Streets in Manhattan.
Rendering showing bird’s-eye view of proposed Fifth Avenue plaza redesign (image: OLIN)
The plan also calls for the creation of new fountains—to replace the deteriorating ones that have been in use since they were built in the 1970s along with the existing plaza. The fountains will be positioned closer to the Museum’s front steps, improving access to its street-level public entrances at 81st and 83rd Streets. The renovated plaza will also feature tree-shaded allées (in place of the current trees that have limited lifespans and low environmental benefits due to their planting conditions), permanent and temporary seating areas, and entirely new, energy-efficient and diffused nighttime lighting. Seasonal planting will be added along the building to provide color and visual interest throughout the year. All of these new features respect and complement the architectural highlights of the landmark façade and the monumental, recently refurbished central stairs. OLIN, the landscape architecture, urban design, and planning firm, has been retained by the Museum as the lead design consultant for the project.
The entire project will be funded through the generosity of Museum Trustee and philanthropist David H. Koch.
Forty years have passed since the last renovation to the Metropolitan Museum’s Fifth Avenue presence, when the design emphasis focused on accommodating vehicular access. Today, pedestrian access is a greater priority, and some of the exterior works—including the fountains, trees, limited seating, and paving—have aged beyond repair. In particular, no long-term solution has been found for maintaining the fountains, which recently underwent a round of temporary repairs. The Museum will leave untouched the most iconic element of the prior design, the monumental front steps at 82nd Street.
mproved Museum Access
In the new renovation plan, Museum access would be improved by providing additional seating options to either side of the grand staircase and by replacing the long fountains currently impeding access to the doors at 81st and 83rd Streets. The existing pavement along the façade of the Museum would be removed and replaced with new North American granite paving to accommodate pedestrians along myriad routes to and from the doors and steps of the Museum.
Fountains
A pair of contemporary granite fountains, designed by the award-winning firm Fluidity Design Consultants, would be operational year-round, bracketing the grand stairs to create an energized connection between people sitting on the steps and those at the fountains, while punctuating the long plaza along Fifth Avenue with attractive water elements. Each fountain would be a quiet square form inset with a circular stone dome, with seating on long stone benches placed adjacent to the north and south edges of the pools. A circular basin would be subtracted from the rectilinear stone form to reveal a shallow stone dome occupying the basin’s negative space and generating a lens effect in the pool’s water volume. Evenly spaced nozzles, mounted around the edge of the circular basin, would orient glassy streams toward the center of the feature. The streams would be individually size-controlled and programmed to present a wide variety of programmable patterns. In winter, the water would be warmed by recycling steam to prevent freezing, thereby allowing for year-round use.
Landscaping
At the far north and south ends of the wings by McKim, Mead, and White, where the architecture steps forward toward the street, two allées of large Little Leaf Linden trees would be planted, one on each margin of the sidewalk, continuing the shaded route along the Central Park wall and aligned to the rhythm of the windows facing Fifth Avenue. These trees would be pruned in the form of two aerial hedges, similar to the trees at the Palais Royal in Paris. Existing flagpoles would be relocated to rise above the trees at the ends of each allée, responding to the architectural arches of the façade. The presence of trees would create a pleasant experience within the streetscape, reinforcing the central plaza’s volume, yet hedged to ensure that the trees do not detract from the monumentality of the Museum’s façade.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, founded in 1870, is one of the world’s largest and finest museums. Its collections include nearly two million works of art spanning more than 5,000 years of world culture, from prehistory to the present and from every part of the globe. The Museum’s 2.4 million-square-foot building has vast holdings represented by a series of collections, each of which ranks in its category among the best in the world. Last year the Metropolitan Museum was visited by more than 5.6 million people. – www.metmuseum.org