A new addition for back-of-house space is visible just behind the historic mansion of the Frick Collection on East 70th Street in New York.
Photographer: Nicholas Venezia
Inside the Quiet, Extravagant Expansion of the Frick Collection
Architect Annabelle Selldorf took a light touch to a $330 million renovation of the beloved New York art museum.
The Frick Collection, a beloved New York art museum known for its essential European paintings, will reopen on April 17 after a five-year hiatus for a $330 million renovation and expansion. Its magnificence is an artifact of the Gilded Age of the late 19th and early 20th centuries when Henry Clay Frick built his fortune with a rapidity comparable to today’s tech moguls — and spent a considerable amount of his wealth assembling a crown jewel collection of Old Masters and erecting a suitably grand home for it.
Though Frick had never been reticent about displaying his wealth, the limestone mansion he completed in 1914 was an austere Beaux Arts take on French classical city houses, designed by the American architect Thomas Hastings. In Manhattan, it stretches a full block along Fifth Avenue across from Central Park, with asymmetrical wings enclosing a garden.