Museum gets building that celebrates its mission
The Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria Queens is renowned for its innovative exhibitions that celebrate screen culture in all of its forms including motion pictures, television and digital media. Happily the Museum is to get a new home that celebrates its mission.
The Thomas Leeser designed expansion and renovation seamlessly merges architecture with the moving image to create new visitor experiences. Visitors will enter the building through a series of moving images displayed on 242 video monitors. In the lobby a wall that stretches along one side of the visitor's route into the building will be a seamless panorama of projected video 50 feet long by 8 feet high. Beyond the lobby is a ramp to a theatre designed as a "kind of capsule for the imaginary voyage of moving going". Opposite the entrance to the theatre, is a grand Corian staircase that widens into a 1,700 square foot amphitheatre. The third floor of the addition will house a new gallery of changing exhibitions as well as a new Collection Study Center. Among the more remarkable features of the new building is the Museum's first outdoor space- the Screening Garden.
The 65,000 square foot project, which is designed to receive a LEED Silver rating from the United State Green Building Council, is expected to complete construction in 2009
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