NEW YORK, USA
This project provides enlarged gunners for the Museum of American Folk Art within a midtown Manhattan high-rise building. A freestanding, eighty-foot-high portal designed as a proscenium creates an identity for the museum as well as the office tower above. Through this monumental entrance, two symmetrical stairways lead to the glass foyer of the museum a skylit, three-storied, stepped section inner court. The tower entrance penetrates the staircase axially at street level. Visitors proceed down to the exhibition floors via a series of ramps or stairways designed as a central, elongated spiral. The tower above is divided into three blocks of office floors suspended within a prismatic frame, or envelope. The blocks are set forward as they ascend, expanding their horizontal span as their supporting piers grow taller and thinner. The arrangement of the blocks reduces the tower’s perceived mass; increases its resistance to wind pressure; allows greater penetration of light through the building, and expresses the functions of its interior while still presenting a unified face to the street.
