Hunt, The Great Hall

As you begin the ascent to the Metropolitan Museum, up the twenty-eight great granite steps, through narrow doorways, between the fluted columns, you see the Great Hall, which then explodes in front of you. It was designed by Richard Morris Hunt in 1895. A great masonry space, meant to inspire awe and a sense of arrival. The visitor is not led anywhere in particular. One has three choices, to go north, south, or west. When you take the great staircase you can begin to circulate on the balcony level, perhaps the most exciting experience as one walks down these tunnel-like corridors and looks across this great open space. In early twentieth-century America, there wasn’t enough public money to finish a great building like this. The original plan that it be a palace of white marble was never executed, instead the best Indiana limestone was chosen. The great, uncarved circles are actually one of many examples of where there wasn’t enough money to execute the sculpture program. The use of the Great Hall has changed over time. When that building was first completed, the Great Hall was a gallery for mostly American sculpture. It was dark and overpowering, so it’s--it’s had some facelifts. The next architects of the museum, McKim, Mead and White, enlarged the openings in the domes to allow much more light in. The amount of people who go through the Great Hall today-- it serves the kind of function that railroad stations used to serve: masses of people, efficiently being moved from place to place. Before the Hunt Great Hall addition, it was a self-contained structure in the park. To reorient that building to Fifth Avenue was the most brilliant transformative moment. It serves its function architecturally and I think so emotionally stimulates the people who come in.