https://www.city-journal.org/frick-collection-expansion
Current architectural-alteration plans for the Frick Collection on Manhattan’s Upper East Side—which appear likely to clear their final regulatory hurdle at the end of this month—will cause considerable harm to the finest house museum in the United States. This is particularly unfortunate because the Frick’s superb classical architecture is integral to the experience of its magnificent art collection, consisting largely of Old Master paintings by the likes of Veronese, Rembrandt, van Dyck, and Fragonard.
As part of an expansion of its facilities, which include the 11-floor Frick Art Reference Library building in the northeast corner of its property, the Frick proposes to do away with its Music Room, a fine circular chamber that opens off the building’s Garden Court. Both the room and the court were designed by John Russell Pope in the 1930s. The Frick also proposes to gut the Reception Hall designed by John Barrington Bayley four decades later and to surmount Bayley’s beautiful pavilion housing the hall with a low and recessed—but thoroughly inappropriate—window wall. A new raised roof will make space for a second story on top of the pavilion, where a museum shop will be located, while Pope’s Music Room will be replaced by a special exhibition gallery, rectangular in plan. “Stripped classical” doesn’t do justice to the proposed gallery and new reception hall, which will also replace the Bayley pavilion’s bookshop, lodged behind the existing hall. “Anorexic classical” is more like it. With their dull, blank white walls, these spaces will be as cold as ice, and utterly discordant with the Frick’s architectural character.
The plans have some positive aspects. It will be wonderful for visitors to climb the original mansion’s grand staircase to the second floor, where Pope converted family quarters into museum offices. These will now be used for the exhibition of small paintings, drawings, and works of decorative art. And the Frick has long emphasized its need for a larger auditorium, better conservation facilities, and better accommodations for school groups. But to degrade the existing house museum would be a terrible mistake.
In 1912, Pittsburgh steel magnate Henry Clay Frick retained Thomas Hastings, whose New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue had just been completed, to design a home extending from 70th Street to 71st Street and facing Central Park. The Paris-trained Hastings was one of the nation’s foremost exponent of French classicism, the museum’s dominant architectural idiom. The home Hastings designed for Frick was a low-slung mansion built of Indiana limestone whose porte-cochère entrance was set back from 70th Street. The mansion’s exquisitely detailed gallery—100 feet long and 35 feet wide, with walls covered in dark green silk velvet and crowned by a segmental glass vault—fronted on 71st Street.
