Morgan Library & Museum (New York City, New York)

 museum, library, interesting place, historic landmark

The Morgan Library & Museum houses one of the world's greatest collections of artistic, literary, musical, and historical works. Included in its holdings are original scores by Mozart and Beethoven, drawings by Rembrandt and Rubens, medieval and Renaissance works, three Gutenberg Bibles, literary manuscripts by Dickens and Twain, and five thousand year-old Near Eastern carvings. Occupying a newly enlarged, midtown Manhattan campus, designed by renowned architect Renzo Piano, the Morgan reopened to the public on April 29, 2006.

The Piano-designed conservatory links the three other main buildings of the complex: The brownstone Phelps Stokes Morgan House at the northwest corner of the block, the original 1903 McKim-designed library building on 36th Street, and the Benjamin Wistar Morris-designed annex building to the west of the original library, which replaced the elder Morgan's residence in 1928.

The modernist Piano pavilion, although externally "bland", the building helps to organize the interior spaces of the complex. With the expansion above and below street level, the Morgan's exhibition space had been doubled; Piano set its new reading room under a translucent roof structure, to allow scholars to examine manuscripts in natural light. Piano's 4-story steel-and-glass atrium links McKim's library building and the Morgan house in a new ensemble. Added storage facilities were obtained by drilling into Manhattan's bedrock schist.

www.morganlibrary.org