Morgan Library to expand its facilities

NEW YORK, Oct. 25 (UPI) -- The Pierpont Morgan Library, the nation's richest private collection of manuscripts, books, and art works on paper, is planning a $75 million expansion of its facilities that will require it to close for two years.

The library, housed in a complex of buildings on lower Madison Avenue, aims to become more user friendly in the 21st century. It has retained famed architect Renzo Piano to build three steel-and-glass pavilions that will draw together its existing buildings - a 150 year-old brownstone mansion, an early 19th century library building, and a later annex.

The Piano addition will require the removal of a glass-enclosed garden court built only 11 years ago to unite the library's buildings. This will be replaced by a new entrance to the library from Madison Avenue rather from the East 36th Street annex entrance that has been used since the library opened to the public in the late 1920s after the death of J. Pierpont Morgan Sr.

The annex was built on the site of the home of the financier, who had built the adjoining library in the former garden of his mansion in 1906, designed by Charles McKim in the style of a Renaissance Italian villa. The brownstone next door had been a Morgan family home and later the headquarters of the Lutheran Church in America until it was acquired by the library in 1988 for its administrative offices and a bookshop.

The library's greatest problem has been its confusing floor plan, which has defied attempts to make circulation of visitors more logical. There is only one large exhibition room, and overflow exhibits or secondary exhibits have to be hung in a narrow hallway that also serves visitors who want to visit Morgan's splendid Renaissance style library and his personal den decorated with Old Master paintings and sculptures.

The expanded library will have an inner courtyard beyond the entrance lobby that will simplify access to the complex's various components. Annual attendance at the library has grown from 100,00 in 1987, when Charles E. Pierce became executive director, to 200,000 last year, and that number is expected to be doubled when the Piano addition provides more exhibition galleries, a reading room, and new office space.

"My goal has been to let the sun shine in and open the place up," said Pierce, a former Vassar College literature professor, said in an interview. "There has been a conscious effort since the 1990s to raise our profile."

Some 43,000 of the 69,000 square feet in the Piano addition will be underground and include a 280-seat auditorium and vault space for storage. This will allow the addition to be kept at the same height above ground as the existing structures. The underground space will be sunk into Manhattan bedrock to a depth of flour floors and will provide the safest possible storage for some of the world's great literary treasures unless the library is subjected to a direct hit by a nuclear device.

The library has a collection of 350,000 items, all of which will have to be stored elsewhere during construction expected to begin next year. Some 30,000 of these works dealing with post-1870 American literature constitute a recent gift from the estate of a library trustee, Carter Burden, and have not yet been exhibited. Another trustee, Eugene V. Thaw, has just promised the library his survey collection of French drawings from Jacques Louis David to Paul Cezanne.

Other jewels in the collection are ancient cuneiform tablets and papyrus scrolls, Medieval and Mughal illuminated manuscripts, a Gutenberg Bible, Old Master drawings, manuscripts by Honore de Balzac and William Faulkner, original music scores by Frederic Chopin and Richard Wagner, and drawings by Piranesi, William Blake, J.A.D. Ingres, and Winslow Homer.

The library is administered by a board that includes several Morgan descendants and has as its president S. Parker Gilbert, former chairman of Morgan Stanley, the investment firm. He is reputed to be one of the major donors toward the cost of the expansion, a project that ties in nicely with designation earlier this year of the library's Murray Hill neighborhood as a historic district by the Landmarks Preservation Commission.

"It is a nice moment in time to do some important things which we think will have a lasting, positive impact," Gilbert told United Press International. "Where we want the library to go is not drastically different from what it is today - a relatively small scholarly space where people can learn about the world's great cultural achievements."