It is nearly impossible to convey to someone who has not been to New York’s Morgan Library how splendid it is. Here is an experience comparable to that of the world’s great museums, but without the walking. In a few superb rooms is a compact précis of western civilization itself: carved Babylonian cylinder seals along with drawings by Leonardo and Michelangelo, the ninth-century Lindau Gospels as well as musical scores scrawled in Beethoven’s furioso hand. One normally encounters such treasures in a formidable institutional setting, uncertain whether one is admiring the power of the object or that of the collector. But while J. P. Morgan was indeed a collector of great power, no less a robber baron on the art market than on Wall Street, his library remains as intimate and personal as a diary.
In 1902 Morgan conceived the idea of building a library next to his house at Thirty-sixth Street and Madison Avenue. For his architect he chose Charles Follen McKim, that prodigiously gifted classicist who had recently built an art museum for Bowdoin College, based on the Villa Giulia in Rome. Morgan must have admired the Bowdoin museum, for he paraphrased it freely in his library. Each is a symmetrical jewel box of a building, fronted by a gracious open loggia and a screen of Ionic columns, leading in turn to a central domed space. Today one tends to think of classical buildings as essentially interchangeable since they are derived from the same limited repertoire of forms. But so is the human face, and just as each has its distinctive physiognomy so McKim inflected his classical forms to suit the function and character of each commission. In adapting the Bowdoin prototype for the Morgan he eliminated its visible dome, a feature that would have given the private library an inappropriately civic character.
Over the years Morgan’s library has expanded without sacrificing its essential identity. After Morgan’s death in 1913, his son Jack opened the library to the public; in 1928 he demolished his father’s house on the site of which he built a polite neoclassical annex. Much later, in 1988, the Morgan acquired Jack’s own house, a portly mid-Victorian affair on the corner of Thirty-seventh and Madison. Since then the architectural dilemma of the Morgan has been to draw together these three separate buildings without violating the temple-like integrity of the original building.
The first attempt was not a success. In 1991 Voorsanger Associates roofed the courtyard over as an enclosed atrium. It made functional sense but its formal solution—a glass canopy in the form of a cresting wave—was too hyperactive for the context. This has now given way to a comprehensive enlargement by the architect Renzo Piano, which opened this last April to coincide with the centenary of the completion of McKim’s original building. A serious and important design, it will assuage those who dreaded the enlargement, fearing a desecration. Whether it lives up to the grand claims made on its behalf is another matter.
Piano was handed an ambitious program: 75,000 square feet of space were needed, comprising new storage vaults, a 280-seat auditorium, a greatly enlarged public reading room, and an entirely new entrance. All this was to be inserted into the T-shaped space between the three buildings (the site is nearly a square except for the brick apartment house that claims the northeast corner). The pinched interior site meant that most of the new space would be acquired by burrowing downwards; it also meant that the building would be dominated by its interior space and not by its façades, which are limited to three narrow openings on Thirty-sixth, Madison, and Thirty-seventh, where it pokes its head out in the narrow slivers of space between the extant buildings.
There was always something incongruous about the original Morgan, which took a design devised for an Italian Renaissance garden—with an open loggia for viewing and entertaining—and thrust it onto a dense urban street. Nonetheless, for better or worse, its classicism has been the point of departure for each successive alteration. Piano’s guiding principle seems to have been to respect this without descending to the excessive deference of the 1928 annex, which is merely a less opulent version of McKim’s building. Instead he has sought an abstract classicism, one without the classical orders but with a classical sense of restraint and rhythm and balance. This is most apparent on his three street façades, spare compositions of glass walls and slender panels of steel; the latter are painted white with a subtle tint of pink to suggest the “Tennessee pink” marble of the original building.
As an interstitial building, shoehorned into the middle of a block, the Morgan addition does not have an assertive physical presence; only from within can it be experienced as a totality. And here its character is rather more ecclesiastical than classical. Its atrium forms a processional nave leading from Madison Avenue, its light falling obliquely through a raised clerestory, as in a Gothic cathedral. Even the arms that reach to Thirty-sixth and Thirty-seventh streets (and which can be glimpsed tantalizingly from the sidewalk) suggest an abstract transept. Radiant and luminous, this atrium is an architectural tour de force.
Praise for the building has ranged from the lavish to the immoderate. Nicolai Ouroussoff of The New York Times promptly praised it as “a taut architectural composition bursting with civic hope” and as a “building that doesn’t retreat from the city, but makes us fall in love with it all over again.” This is not so much criticism as civic boosterism, but then Mr. Ouroussoff seems not to have liked the old Morgan very much at all. In the same review he criticizes the “severe Palladian façade” of McKim’s library, and terms it “a dignified reliquary for a dying culture.” Piano’s building, however, may not be a dignified reliquary but it is hardly flawless.
A public building must always be judged on the logic and ease of its circulation. A thoughtful floor plan should always act to encourage movement, coaxing the visitor forward with a kind of happy impetuosity. But Piano’s processional atrium, light and airy as it is, does not proceed anywhere; it directs the visitor to a glass wall where it abruptly terminates, as if the minuscule garden beyond were the principal point of the movement. The atrium has something of a self-contained, or perhaps self-satisfied, quality, for it does not lead smoothly and generously to its destination, the original Morgan Library and the 1928 annex. One must find these as one seeks out the restroom in a department store, by fumbling about in the corners.
Other details seem only half resolved. The stairs to the auditorium drop as abruptly as a trapdoor, without transition or threshold. Their prominent location is that of a grand public staircase but their pinched proportions and cramped footprint are those of a secondary stair (apparently most visitors are expected to wait for the elevator). And the second-story gallery has an oddly provisional location, like that of a catwalk, and is not locked meaningfully into the structure of the space.
The one truly discordant note is the Clare Eddy Thaw gallery, the cubic room lodged between the McKim building and the 1928 annex. Such a small and intimate chamber can be a shrine, as is the lovely one at Vienna where the Venus of Willendorf holds court. But the making of gem-like rooms is not, so to speak, Piano’s forte. Here he sacrificed the functional requirements of the interior in order to achieve a dynamic effect on the exterior. The cubic block was intended to serve as an intermediate form between the original library and its annex—an “architectonic hyphen,” as Piano terms it. This external consideration generated the proportions of the space, and they are not good. The result is an oppressively constricted dead end of a room, crowded with objects and vitrines, its excessive height adding to the sense of being at the bottom of a well; one exits with relief.
Such infelicities are the signs of a design that has not quite achieved the final resolution of which it was capable. Perfectionists such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe or Louis I. Kahn would toil over their designs until they had achieved a kind of crystalline clarity, and one could no longer distinguish composition from space from structure, so indissoluble was their unity.
But one does not look for resolution from a man who first attained celebrity thirty years ago with his Pompidou Center in Paris, that giddy flaunting of pipes, ducts, and color-coded conduits. More than any other building, this one made possible the visual landscape of Deconstruction, the architectural movement known for its steadfast refusal to resolve its forms into any sort of order, preferring the open-ended and fragmentary to the complete. Piano has since become an establishment figure, but his work bears the stamp of his youth. Just as one can move forwards from ballet to modern dance but not backwards, it is difficult to move from the making of tempestuous collages to the microscopic refinement of proportions. At the same time, clients whose eyes have grown habituated to the tumbling forms of Deconstruction seem willing to tolerate a certain shambling looseness of parts, even in a presumably classical composition. It may be that our age is now uncomfortable with resolution and completeness, and feels a stronger affinity for the fragmentary and incomplete. It may suit the modern anti-heroic mood of our times—if so, it is odd to find this near a building as resolved and formal as the original Morgan.
This may all be due to simple overwork. The celebrity architects of today have enormous practices, and Piano is currently preoccupied with the massive New York Times Headquarters Building and a major addition to the Chicago Art Institute. To be sure, some large corporate firms, such as Skidmore Owings Merrill, have been able to achieve a high level of competence by cultivating a certain standardized house style. Such an approach does not work when firms cultivate a distinctive signature style. In any event, the Morgan Library does not seem to bear the impress of a strong personal involvement on the part of its nominal designer—at least not beyond the stage of settling the initial program.
It is in this respect that McKim’s original library appears in retrospect all the more stunning. It is as refined and scrupulously detailed a building as anything in American history, and it was built even as its designer was simultaneously devising the mighty leviathan of Pennsylvania Station. But this is the mystery of McKim, Mead & White: their ability to conduct a mighty corporate practice while maintaining an unvarying personal control over detail. Perhaps the most unfortunate aspect of Piano’s addition is that it now ensures that the great majority of visitors will now enter the institution from Madison Avenue—without ever once laying eyes on the lovely and civilized building in which the Morgan Library began.
