Brooklyn Museum: Building for the Future

• Continuing Scala’s innovative Art Spaces series
• This book explores the history and development of this popular Manhattan museum

The Brooklyn Museum of Art is the second-largest art museum in New York and among the largest in the United States. It is housed in a 560,000-square-foot landmark Beaux-Arts building, set amid 19th-century parks and gardens. The immense structure that the architects (McKim, Mead & White) envisioned would have been the largest museum building in the world, but only one-sixth of their design was completed. Over the years the original building – a glorious fragment – has been continually adapted. This book traces its 1893-1927 execution and subsequent redevelopment, as well as the campaign of enlightened renovation upon which the Museum has embarked in recent years. It features many fascinating archival images and detail views of the building’s lively decorative programme, and it climaxes with a stunning presentation of the new entrance pavilion – a transparent, light-filled and seemingly weightless structure newly opened to the public that makes this historic edifice a true building for the future.