Brooklyn Museum of Art

When the Brooklyn Museum of Art was built in the late 19th century, visitors entered at the piano nobile level -- a full 28 feet above the ground. The steps formed a daunting and intimidating approach, and were removed in the 1930s in an effort to make the museum more approachable and to attract a wider audience. While it may have accomplished this mission, it unfortunately left an inelegant and unfinished-looking entrance.

Paradoxically, at about the same time, the landscape in front of the museum was fenced and largely turned over to vehicular traffic. JHLA worked with Polshek Partnership Architects LLP to make the museum's entrance more inviting and elegantly egalitarian -- more welcoming to neighbors and accessible to all visitors, with ADA-compliant design features.

The corner site with its dramatic grade change has been made more open with its new plaza, and the building itself opens visually with a glass hemicycle that projects out into the plaza. The plaza plan reflects and reinforces this radial design -- a stepped lawn wraps the glass and provides seating that looks inward to the museum, while a large amphitheater at the east corner opens outward to the neighborhood. A diagonal wall that contains sloping lawn pulls the less symmetrical east side of the grounds back into the project, and echoes the historic sloping lawns of the late 19th century.

The design makes use of plain, simple, straightforward materials: cast-in-place concrete, concrete pavement with granite sett bands, and precast concrete for bench seats.

Plaza Project Team
Architects/Team Lead: Polshek Partnership Architects
Landscape Architects: JHLA (Judith Heintz, Diana Drake)
Fountain Design: WET Design
Lighting Design: H. M. Branston & Partners, Inc.
Civil Engineers: El Taller Colaborativo

Photos by David Tepper, Plan courtesy of JHLA.