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NEW YORK AT ITS CORE | New York, New York | 2016

NEW YORK AT ITS CORE | New York, New York | 2016

Architects: Studio Joseph
Client: Museum of the City of New York
General Contractor: South Side Design & Building


1. The Museum of the City of New York undertook this first-ever permanent exhibition of New York City’s 400-year history in a three-year, iterative, and radically selective process with a multi-disciplinary design team. The story is told through object-rich analog displays coupled with immersive media, in an all-encompassing environment, dramatic in its modernity, and reductive in materiality. A palette of materials and textures unites diverse delivery methods. Formal simplicity of planning relies on a base framework of symmetry and balance. 2. Site Plan. The project is comprised of three galleries, two anteroom displays, strategic public space furnishings and way finding graphics. Two of the three galleries contain artifacts and a mix of analogue and digital presentations that taken together tell a complex history. The third gallery is technology-based “laboratory”. 3. Anteroom graphic is designed to be easily read from afar and then “dissolve” into pixels as you get near, thereby encouraging visitors to come down a long hallway, but then to enter the gallery instead of lingering in the anteroom. 4. “Port City” tackles 300 years of history with 32 objects and large scale immersive media. The projection depicts neighborhoods of the past, dissolving to the same view today. 5. Interactive ‘totems’ at the middle of the room act in sync with that video allowing a deeper dive into life in the City. 6. Views can meet people (and animals) from the past to hear their stories. The content combines political and cultural leaders with everyday life. 7. People are tied digitally to the image of their context on the large projection. 8. Analogue displays treat objects as “jewels” showing how a glass ballot box or Lenape Indian club or a tattoo pen can be a prescient lead into the past. 9. The cases are elegantly lit from within to stringent conservation standards. 10. Each artifact case lined with a back silvered translucent glass. Objects float on cantilevered black metal bases. The desiccant chamber is accessed from the rear. 11. Entry to the second historic gallery showing 1898-2012 (Super Storm Sandy) 12. A media installation at the center of the room flanked by large cases with chronologically arranged artifacts. 13. Close up of visitor with the spatial media. It has an audio track that is in sync with changing images and films from all decades. 14. In a second gallery, nearly a central spatial installation immerses visitors in the rhythms and dynamism of 20th-century New York through vivid, overlapping moving picture. 15. One inhabits the projection area as part of the audio and visual array. On the left interactive media of people from different walks of life as represented by their silhouettes. Flexible, bespoke casework allows curators to rotate artifacts over the 10-year life of the show. 16. The Future of the City Lab encourages visitors to explore different challenges and opportunities that New York will face in coming generations through media and interactive. Using touch screens, one can design parts of the city and then publish the design to the large screen. 17. At that point, using GPS navigation software, your image will appear with others walking through a newly created design. 18. The curatorial question of how to filter the multitude of stories and find the right distillation of creative, political, economic and social examples is one that was discussed by a full team of historians over the course of four years. The gallery allows for some quiet time to absorb all of the information. 19. Thinking about the future, we ask “What if?” visitors fill out cards that give their own thoughts and are also able to interact with experts in various fields of study. 20. The “what if” table is a place of conversation and meeting in a room that is filled with daylight.


Photographers: Copyright Image Page: Page 1: Copyright – Studio Joseph Photo Credit – Thomas Loof Page 2 from top to bottom: • Copyright – Studio Joseph / Photo Credit – Thomas Loof • Copyright – Studio Joseph / Photo Credit – Thomas Loof • Copyright – Studio Joseph / Photo Credit – Thomas Loof • Copyright – Studio Joseph / Photo Credit – Thomas Loof Page 3: Copyright – Studio Joseph Photo Credit – Thomas Loof Page 4: Copyright – Studio Joseph Photo Credit – Thomas Loof Page 5: Copyright – Studio Joseph Photo Credit – Thomas Loof Page 6: Copyright – Studio Joseph Photo Credit – Thomas Loof Page 7: Copyright – Studio Joseph Photo Credit – Filip Wolak Photography Page 8: Copyright – Studio Joseph Photo Credit – Thomas Loof Page 9: Copyright – Studio Joseph Photo Credit – Thomas Loof Page 10: Copyright – Studio Joseph Photo Credit – Thomas Loof Page 11: Copyright – Studio Joseph Photo Credit – Thomas Loof Page 12: Copyright – Studio Joseph Photo Credit – Thomas Loof Page 13: Copyright – Studio Joseph Photo Credit – Thomas Loof Page 14: Copyright – Studio Joseph Photo Credit – Thomas Loof Page 15: Copyright – Studio Joseph Photo Credit – Thomas Loof Page 16: Copyright – Studio Joseph Photo Credit – Thomas Loof Page 17: Copyright – Local Projects Photo Credit – Local Projects Page 18: Copyright – Studio Joseph Photo Credit – Thomas Loof Page 19 from left to right: • Copyright – Studio Joseph / Photo Credit – Thomas Loof • Copyright – Studio Joseph / Photo Credit – Thomas Loof Page 20: Copyright – Studio Joseph Photo Credit – Thomas Loof 


NEW YORK AT ITS CORE
NEW YORK AT ITS CORE
NEW YORK AT ITS CORE
NEW YORK AT ITS CORE

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American Architecture
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