The museum is located in the Astoria quarter of New York's Queens, on the site of the Kaufman Astoria film studio, which was founded here in 1920; then one of the important centers of the film industry arose here. The first cinema museum was opened in this building in 1977, then in 1988 it was reconstructed (then the museum received its difficult to translate modern name - Museum of the Moving Image). The current renovation was conceived in 2005, construction began in 2008. It cost $ 67 million and increased the museum's area by a third. The new part of the museum opened a week and a half ago: a new cinema hall and several small halls appeared in the new wing. In addition to film screenings, various exhibitions of old cinema cameras, costumes and other cinema attributes are organized here, visitors can play old computer games or even have fun adding soundtracks to videos. The museum seeks to show the history of media in all its diversity.
The old building of the film studio, built in 1920 in a style intermediate between functionalism and art deco, will vividly remind a Russian of a school, hospital or factory of Khrushchev's time. It is a rectangular parallelepiped hangar, laconically lined with large rectangular windows with a checkered grid of frames. However, his story is surrounded by the romantic flair of early film history: it was here that former Paramount Pictures chapters Adolph Dzukor and Jesse Laski experimented with the transition from silent to sound films.
Thomas Lieser attached to this building from the side of the courtyard a metal volume with softly streamlined rounded corners (like a television of the same Khrushchev era), making its surface from matte-shiny triangles of thin aluminum on an iron frame. But the main entrance to the museum is still located on the street in the old building. Lieser turned the nearest windows into solid stained-glass windows with metal bindings in the form of all the same triangles. Thus, the "old" surface in the museum building remained orthogonal-perpendicular, and all innovations are indicated by a more unusual triangular grid. Entering from the street through glass with a triangular pattern, visitors enter a completely white lobby that connects the new and old spaces of the museum.
The largest room in the new wing is a 267-seat cinema, inside it is also composed of triangles, only bright blue. The adjoining rooms are smaller, dark blue, and the foyer is red-pink in contrast. The walls, especially in the "blue" hall, are slightly sloped, which makes its space not quite stable. Critic Justin Davidson in "New York Magazine" very emotionally and emotionally describing the interior, says that Lieser, echoing the specifics of cinema, constantly balancing on the brink of illusion and reality, his architecture also keeps right on this edge.
If we imagine the new wing a little more figuratively, then if in the yard we enter the mouth of a metal whale, then upon entering we find ourselves in the red-blue insides of this strange creature. However, the similarity is distant: the architecture of the building, with all the streamlining of its forms, looks rather calm and balanced.
Initially, it was conceived to be more effective. The same Justin Davidson recalls that in 2005 the facade was planned to be made entirely of media, so that viewers entered through the video picture. But 67 million was not enough for this, and the architect had to limit himself to the most necessary. So, starting with active media, attractions and effects, this project by Thomas Lieser has evolved towards sustainability in our post-crisis time. But on the other hand, it's good that they managed to build it at all.
Yu T.
