Let's Get Started: Construction Begins on the Skylights Project
View of one small section of the attics above the European Paintings galleries before construction (left) and during (right). Sixty percent of these galleries will have such platforms in place until spring/summer 2020. All construction photos courtesy of the author
I have spent hundreds of hours in the attics above the European Paintings galleries over the course of my ten-year career at The Met. These attics are unlike any other back-of-the-house area, due to the fact that the corrugated, wire-glass skylight system above these galleries is more than seventy years old and is well past its serviceable lifespan. When these skylights were built, Harry Truman was in the White House and they were state of the art, so one can imagine just how much skylight technology has improved since then!
Without a doubt this project is needed, but how do you replace a glass roof over the world's greatest art museum and still keep it open to visitors? It takes a lot of pre-planning, a skilled design team, a well-qualified construction management firm, and, most definitely, a few dollars. It will also take time—about three and a half years spread out over two phases. We are now at the four-month mark, so we still have a ways to go.
A page from a 1937 Pennsylvania Wire Glass brochure with details of The Met's existing seventy-year-old skylights made up of solid one-half-inch-thick corrugated glass. Each panel is "shingled" over the one beneath it like terracotta roof tiles.
To get a better sense of the complexity of this project, keep in mind that The Met Fifth Avenue is really twenty-one buildings, one built on top of or next to its neighbor, a result of about one hundred years of expansion that ended in the 1970s, when the city told us our footprint could no longer expand. Each wing was built with the best materials and construction practices available at that time, a practice that we continue today. We are the current caretakers of this amazing institution, and we intend to hand it off to the next generation in better condition than we received it.
Aerial view of The Met Fifth Avenue; outlined in red are the roofs over the European Paintings galleries.
It takes a five-person roof shop to maintain our thirteen-acre campus of ninety-nine roofs. We are constantly cleaning gutters and drains, re-caulking skylights, replacing broken seventy-year-old corrugated skylight glass, and numerous other tasks, from shoveling snow off the high ledges to climbing the rafters to get to difficult leaks. This project will effectively eliminate our most problematic area, thus allowing us to better protect the collection and focus more on Museum-wide maintenance. The new skylights are also much more energy efficient, which will go a long way towards lowering our carbon footprint.
Above left: View of one of the European Paintings galleries after the art and glass ceiling were removed and floor and wall protections installed. Above right: The same gallery with scaffolding going up through the glass ceiling grid. Bottom: The attic space above this gallery with a wall-to-wall work platform supported by scaffolding installed in the gallery below.
Panoramic image of the work platform installed in the northern attic. This platform is more than twenty-five feet above the gallery floors and will give construction crews easier access to the ductwork and surrounding infrastructure.
In order to mobilize and prepare the attics for this monumental task, we needed to construct an extensive network of work platforms in the attics that are supported by a forest of pipe scaffolding down in the closed galleries. Since this action alone is quite costly, it was determined that we should address anything that would require similar platforms so we are only paying for these once in our lifetime. This has resulted in substantial improvements to our HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) system that is actually more costly than the new skylights themselves.
View of one of the steel I-beams being lifted into position with the assistance of a crane. This will become the bridge between the material hoist and our roof.
Three hoists were also required to get all our materials to the roofs and attics. The "bridge" between the hoists and the roof is supported by large steel I-beams that were placed with a crane staged outside the rear of the Museum in Central Park.
Panoramic image of the work platform in the northern attic as weatherproofing materials are installed.
Even though we will be using tents and tarps on the roofs to keep the weather out of our attics, we expect some water might bypass these measures, so a secondary means of protection was added to the logistics plan. The attic platforms will now get wall-to-wall waterproofing to help further protect the first-floor galleries in which our Medieval Art and European Sculpture and Decorative Arts collections are installed.
The adventure is just beginning, and we will keep you posted with further updates. When this project is done—the largest of its kind ever conducted here at The Met—we will have made a substantial leap forward in modernizing our systems that keep the art safe and dry.
Related Content
View the web feature Met Masterpieces in a New Light for more information about the Skylights Project and explore ways to engage with the Department of European Paintings' collection online.
Read more articles in this blog series.