East Building Architectural Tour
Interior, Exhibition Spaces
Flexibility is the keynote to the East Building, both for loan exhibitions and for changing selections from the Gallery's twentieth-century collection. The exhibition area consists of eleven large spaces. Visitors seldom see the full extent of these areas because the spaces are continually partitioned and reshaped to best display the works of art on view. Any wall in the East Building that is not clad in lavender-pink stone is temporary, similar to movie or stage sets. The images above illustrate how an idea for an exhibition space in the Circa 1492 exhibition became a structure housing works of art -- in this instance, Islamic rugs.
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Ceiling heights vary throughout the five stories of available exhibition space. On the Ground Level, 10-foot ceilings are ideal for the display of intimate works of art such as drawings, prints, and photographs. The Tower Galleries, 35 feet high and accessible by elevator and spiral staircases, allow the installation of large sculpture, such as these welded steel pieces by David Smith. Exhibition designers can manipulate the skylights to mix natural and artificial light and change ceiling heights. The two illustrations above depict the same space during different exhibitions --
David Smith, shown on the left, and Treasure Houses
of Britain, on the right.
Audio: I. M. Pei and Earl A. Powell III
- Architectural Flexibity and Modern Art
- RealAudio
- The House Museum
- RealAudio
