Museum of the Moving Image – An Architecture Review

Being perceived as dull is a possibility worse than death for any New Yorker worth their salt: ambitious New Yorkers aspire to be up, at ‘em, and progressively-stylishly-fascinating from every angle. Historically, New York has produced iconic buildings to match. In more recent times, this obsession with defying dullness has sometimes unfortunately led to buildings that are shiny, whorey gimmicks: they appear to be designed for novelty value alone, and as an opportunity for the architect to show-off with special effects.

Thankfully, novel developments are not all this way. The expanded and re-designed Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, is deliciously tricked out, but because its architect—Tom Leeser of Leeser Architecture—has done this in a conscientious way that is integrated with the building’s protagonist (the moving image) and purpose (showcasing the moving image), the result has a deep integrity.

The “new” museum opened in January 2011, and includes the addition of a 264-seat theater and 68-seat screening room; video screening amphitheater; small café; exhibition gallery; and high-tech educational spaces. The complete redesign of the ground floor along with the construction of a three-story addition and a (work in progress) 10,370 foot courtyard garden, has doubled the size of the old 1920s building, enabling the museum to more effectively deliver on its mission to “advance public understanding and appreciation of the art, history, technique, and technology of film, television, and digital media.” From the exterior of the building, the new addition is clearly demarcated by materials: its pale blue windowless surface is made of aluminum panels, which are laser cut as triangles within triangles. This introduces the building’s two key motifs: color and the triangle shape, which, on the building’s exterior, butt up against the old cream concrete of the original structure.

True to the experience of the moving image, which can envelop and transport us to other worlds appearing in different colors to our own, much of the museum’s new architecture ushers in and cocoons one in a multi-plane, other-worldly colored space. This evokes the spacey feeling that we might just be inside a film like 1997’s sci-fi, space age Gattaca … set somewhere in the distant future.

This sense of being inside a moving image is most intense on the ground floor. The entrance on 35th Avenue is surrounded by mirrored glass delineated into small Art Deco-esque triangles emblazoned with the 3.5-foot tall letters THE MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE in hot pink outline. This is flashy and dashy, but not merely for flash and dash’s sake. The mirror façade embodies the central idea of the building: that all surfaces can come alive and can become screens. Indeed, standing in front of the entrance one can see oneself reflected in a mass of mini home movies.

The idea of the “alive surface” continues inside as one walks past a 50-foot-long wall space to the left of the lobby area, on which artworks selected by the museum’s curatorial team are showcased on a changing basis. Singapore artist Ming Wong’s Persona Performa is being exhibited here as a site-specific theatrical event until April 1, 2012. Inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona, the work is a video panorama, using five projectors and software that seamlessly integrate a row of 24 frames of 24 actors, playing 24 “personas.” This space provides the museum with a key area in which to display digital artworks that address issues like the effects of participatory media on culture.

The lobby has a blue-almost-white floor and surfaces, and features custom-made white Corian counters and benches. At its far end is a café, located opposite a gathering space beneath a sloping ceiling. The café’s furniture is made from white molded plastic and has been produced at an almost child-like scale: sitting in a small chair at a small table, like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s Mike TeeVee, one feels as if shrunken and beamed inside a television set. Even the entirely unembellished, slick, white, strictly rectilinear stairwell ascending from the lobby looks as if it has been borrowed from the Star Trek set.

The theater, accessed on the right of the lobby, is the grand climax of ground floor. It is entered as if on a trip to the moon, through a sloping tunnel of intense electric blue. The interior surface of the theater space itself is webbed in a galaxy of skewed triangular panels in the same electric blue, with the seams lit from within. The theatre is clearly designed to successfully facilitate a voyage into the fantasy of film, and is equipped with state of the art equipment in order to do it.

An education center takes up the remainder of the ground floor, and it enables the museum to accommodate 60,000 students a year. It has a screening room with a hot pink felt lined entrance that is in contrast to the theater’s electric blue, and a grey, perforated wall treatment for effective acoustics. There is also an open plan seminar room, which can be divided into two separate classrooms by pulling hospital-style, double-sided fabric curtains, with Mondrian-esque designs on them. This is a mod environment in which the beautiful surgeons of Grey’s Anatomy might flirt with each other while giving important medical presentations.

As one moves upward through the building the interior architecture becomes less and less programmed and increasingly less interesting, as the magical cocooning effects of the ground floor’s design drop away. One is alight and alive inside Gattaca on the ground floor, but progressing up though the building, there is a feeling of being spat out backstage at a play, where suddenly all the manual workings are apparent and the fantasy fades.

At the first landing, the Star Trek staircase delivers one directly into a 1,700 square-foot video screening amphitheater, which has the familiar white cube feel of a contemporary museum. Up the staircase to the second floor, there is a small exhibition gallery, a secondary entrance to the theater and an entrance to one of the two floors of the 15,000 square-foot core exhibition Behind the Screen, which has been refurbished with new monitors, computers, interactive software, and lighting. This exhibition is, for the most part, set in a traditional black box spaces, replete with static foam-core board signs and display plinths. The viewer yearns for more movement (could the old film cameras on display be animated with film backdrops of directors shooting film in that era?) and modernity (could the static signs be digitized, and feature engaging fonts like that of the museum’s logo?).

These two upper floors have to do a lot of heavy lifting in terms of displaying a plethora of moving image related artifacts and interactive experiences, so the more down-to-earth practicality here in the interior architecture is understandable. But, after feeling so very cool and futuristic on the ground floor, the traditional settings and display techniques in these two floors are a buzz kill. It is the inverse of the world depicted in Fritz Lange’s Metropolis: here the heavy, less fantastical lifting is done above ground, leaving us to glide around fantastically in la-la land on the ground floor.

This ascending glory fade gives the net impression that the new Museum of the Moving Image isn’t one hundred percent in the can: the ground floor’s brilliant visual novelty is not seamless and unified throughout the building. One wants to linger on and on down there, enveloped in filmic cool, but there is a feeling of being pleased to leave the upper floors after having viewed the key contents there. There is the sense that in the ambitious additions, the museum spent the lion’s share of the budget in the stunning main public areas, and neglected the exhibition spaces to the extent that they feel left behind in terms of the overall design.

That said, the knockout success of the Museum of Moving Image’s ground floor means that, overall, the “new” museum is in no danger of being dull. This is a progressive, stylish, and fascinating architectural addition, which delivers thoughtfully on the building’s purpose … being in it is like watching years’ worth of incredible films all in one delicious hit: almost too good to be true.