Let the (Indirect) Sun Shine In
A storied structure in Queens
In contrast to the ground-up new BCAM, the Queens Museum of Art (QMA), in New York City's Flushing Meadows Corona Park, is expanding within its seven-decade-old building. Since 1972, the QMA has occupied the northern half of a 105,000-square-foot, limestone-clad, long-span structure that served as the New York City Pavilion for both the 1939 and 1964 World's Fairs and briefly housed the General Assembly of the United Nations. But in the fall of 2010, the museum will double its size by taking over the southern half of the storied "modern classical" building, replacing an ice-skating rink with daylit galleries designed by Grimshaw and Washington, D.C.−based Ammann & Whitney.
The plan for QMA is in some ways an inversion of other recent museum expansion schemes, such as Foster+Partners' courtyard at the National Portrait Gallery, in Washington, D.C. [record, March 2008, page 98]. But at QMA, instead of enclosing an outdoor space, the architects plan to carve out a covered courtyard from an existing building. The central programmatic element in the QMA scheme is a new "large works" gallery with a 55-by-40-foot fixed baffled skylight inserted in the roof above. A 30-foot-tall structure suspended from the roof trusses and floating about 10 feet from the gallery floor will surround the new skylight with frosted-glass fins.
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The hanging element, together with fabric baffles enclosing the roof trusses and the large-works gallery floor, reflect, refract, and diffuse daylight passing through the new skylight and direct it to flanking side galleries. These seven smaller galleries-except for two intended for multimedia pieces or extremely light-sensitive work that are completely enclosed-have fixed aluminum louvered ceilings that further reflect and diffuse daylight. "The strategy provides two levels of control," explains New York City−based Tom Gallagher, QMA project manager for lighting-design firm George Sexton Associates. "It prevents direct light from hitting artwork and controls diffuse and scattered light," he says.
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Because even indirect light can be detrimental to artwork, the designers established an annual exposure budget in consultation with QMA curators. Their target of 65,000 foot-candle hours per year includes both daylight and electric light provided by a straightforward system of manually switched wall washers and spotlights. An alternative conservation approach is to establish a maximum exposure level at any one point in time, based on worst-case daylighting conditions, such as those during summer solstice. But the annual exposure method used at QMA (and also at BCAM) "provided more latitude to design with natural fluctuations in daylight levels," says Gallagher. This relatively common approach, sometimes referred to as "reciprocity," allows museums to balance conservation criteria with their desire to allow daylight into exhibition spaces.