Renovated Frick Reopens

World-Architects visited The Frick Collection one week ahead of the opening, on the first preview day set aside for members of the museum. It was the first time slot on the first day of the previews, and the line to get in was around the block, from the entrance at 1 East 70th Street, around the corner on Fifth Avenue, and nearly extending to 71st Street. Before it started moving, the end of the line reached close to the Portico Gallery, notably the site of The Frick’s most recent renovation: the former loggia was enclosed by Davis Brody Bond in 2011 for the display of porcelains. A few minutes later, while walking through the renovated galleries inside the former Frick residence, I heard at least two members say, excitedly, “everything is back!” Which made me wonder if the “renovation and enhancement,” as The Frick describes the five-year project, offered anything new for visitors, or if aimed to be invisible relative to what it was before.

First, what was there before? The house of Henry C. Frick, a coke and steel magnate from Pennsylvania, was completed in 1914, a few years after the Lenox Hill Library, which formerly occupied the block-long parcel on Fifth Avenue facing Central Park, was torn down. The library had moved a mile and a half down Fifth Avenue to the grand New York Public Library designed in the Beaux-Arts style by Carrère and Hastings. Frick, who had amassed a sizable art collection, hired the firm's Thomas Hastings in 1912 (John Merven Carrère had died in 1911) to design his house, stipulating that it be converted into a museum after his death and the death of his wife, Adelaide. Hastings designed it in a Louis XVI style, with a grand gallery topped by a skylight along 71st Street and living spaces looking through large windows to a garden on Fifth Avenue. Frick would enjoy his house for just four years, while his widow lived there until 1931. A year after Adelaide's death, John Russell Pope won the commission to renovate the rooms of the house as needed for the new museum, add a new entrance pavilion, enclosed court, and other museum spaces east of the house, and design a new building on 71st Street for the Frick Art Research Library (now Frick Art Reference Library). The Frick Collection opened to the public in 1935.

In 1977, about halfway between The Frick’s grand opening in 1935 and its grand reopening in 2025, a reception hall designed by John Barrington Bayley was added on East 70th Street, accompanied by a small garden designed by John Russell Page. Bayley designed the one-story addition in a matching neoclassical style, even using limestone from the same Indiana quarry as the house and moving the walls removed from the old building during construction to the north and east sides of Page’s garden. As such, the reception hall and garden from 1977 fused with the Frick’s 1914 and 1935 buildings, making it a grand whole—the museum that members and other visitors became accustomed to in the ensuing decades. 

Accordingly, the Frick’s 2014 plans by Davis Brody Bond to expand the museum by extending the mass of the tall Research Library southward to 70th Street, destroying the garden and reception hall in the process, were met with vehement opposition and were swiftly abandoned by the museum. Four years later, in April 2018, the Frick unveiled a smaller, more respectful proposal for expansion by Selldorf Architects. That proposal was approved by the Landmarks Preservation Commission and led the museum to set up a temporary home nearby in the former Whitney Museum of American Art—calling it the Frick Madison—while construction on its landmark home was carried out. The Frick moved out of the Frick Madison (now Sotheby's) in spring 2024, about a year ahead of this week's reopening.

Regardless of their familiarity with The Frick, visitors to the museum on or after April 17 will find a cohesive museum with spaces ideally suited for the display of Frick's art collection spanning from the 15th century to the 19th century, with just a few distinctly new additions in non-gallery spaces. Annabelle Selldorf, working with the preservation experts at Beyer Blinder Belle as executive architect, kept a light hand in restoring the exterior and interior of the 90-year-old building, while making the new elements and spaces more in line with what museum-goers today expect. Visitors entering the museum from 70th Street are ushered into the reconfigured reception hall, a more generous and less ornate space than Bayley's design and now punctuated by a dramatic new marble staircase at the far end. A grand stair sits at the heart of the Frick residence, so it makes sense that Selldorf's new stair makes a bold statement but is in line with the rich materiality of the existing building.

The marble stair leads up to a new floor that has been added atop Bayley's formerly one-story reception hall. With its long benches, the second-floor hall is a welcome space of rest for museum-goers, be it at the beginning or end of their visits. From here, visitors can go to the newly created second-floor galleries in the old residence (the rooms there were previously off limits), spend some money in the new gift shop, or grab a lunch in the café that will open soon. The windows of the hall, gift shop, and café provide views down to Page's garden, an inaccessible space that is also visible from the sidewalk and the reception hall. Although this new second-floor hall is the most modern space in the Frick, it is still rooted in the vocabulary of the museum, particularly the vaulted ceiling that recalls the original west gallery from Hastings' 1914 building.

Walking down the new staircase (or taking the elevator in the now-fully accessible museum) leads to the new 218-seat auditorium that sits literally two levels below the garden. The auditorium replaces the first-floor music room that Pope designed in 1935, a circular space that was beloved by musicians but had a smaller capacity, not quite 150. (The music room was converted to an exhibition space, while a new education room and link to the Art Reference Library were added adjacent to it and the reception hall.) Designed like a clamshell, the new auditorium is the most stunning part of the Frick's $220 million renovation and enhancement, though given its function many visitors to the museum will never experience it. With its location beneath the garden, Page's design had to be torn out and replanted “as faithfully as possible,” per a statement from the museum, such that repeat visitors to the Frick on opening week will see a landscape decidedly different than what they remember. Yet, it will be just a matter of time before the plants grow, fill in, and the garden resembles its old self. And then members can say, without exception, “everything is back!”