The white stucco facade to what had been Paramount Studio's East Coast operation in the 1920s still carries a whiff of back-lot Hollywood; in fact, it is registered on the National List of Historic Places. (The street facade cannot be altered, except for three windows at the entrance.)
Since the existing building is a protected landmark, the entry design is minimal, three bays of storefront in the old facade with small triangles of mirrored glass and the museum's name written in clear glass outlined with bright pink lines. In reality the glass is all the same, but a film applied to it creates the various effects of translucency and transparency.
The three-story addition to the rear, visible only along the side streets, is box-shaped and entirely clad in pale aluminum panels in a 3-D digital-grid pattern.
The public spaces on the ground floor are white. The projection wall extends directly over the staircase, so that visitors entering the space from below will sometimes seem to emerge directly out of the image. From there visitors either go up to the exhibition floors or turn into the main theater. The theater’s faceted interior, composed of triangular panels colored a Yves Klein blue, bring to mind early German Expressionism. The curtain, a violent explosion of color designed by Cindy Sirko, looks like a digital version of the paintings of early Soviet artists.
In the main theater, where the digital-like wire grid motif takes on folds, crimps and chamfered edges, making the truly blue space feel comfortably snug (although being inside a quilted Chanel bag also comes to mind).
The new Museum of the Moving Image is the finest recent American example of high level of architecture, all the more astonishing in that it was almost entirely publicly funded in these lean times.
Architectural Team: Leeser Architecture, New York
Founder and Principal: Thomas Leeser
Project Manager: David Linehan
Design Team: Simon Arnold, Kate Burke, Sofia Castricone, Henry Grosman, Joseph Haberl
WHERE Museum of the Moving Image, 35th Avenue at 37th Street, Astoria, Queens.
