Museum of Chinese in America

Maya Lin channels history with a new home for a growing Chinatown institution

By William Hanley

What began nearly three decades ago as the Chinatown History Project, a grassroots organization collecting cultural objects from the sprawling center of Chinese culture in New York, grew into the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA). It displayed its ever-expanding collection inside a paper-lantern-inspired gallery in Lower Manhattan designed by Billie Tsien, AIA. But as the institution’s curatorial agenda expanded to encompass Chinese-American history on a national scale — from New York to California to Kansas — it needed a facility to house more exhibition space and help it develop a national public profile.

Program

MOCA secured a space on the northern edge of Chinatown, and in 2006, it commissioned Maya Lin to turn it into a new home. Not only was Lin a celebrated Chinese-American designer, but she also had a longstanding history with the museum. She, in turn, brought in her associate architect Bialosky+Partners Architects to work on the project.

The midblock amalgam of two buildings with storefronts on both its east and west sides was formerly a machine shop. “The space was really rough,” says Lin. The museum would occupy 14,000 square feet on two stories, the street level and a below-grade lower floor. In those spaces, it needed to house galleries for exhibiting its collection of cultural objects — the collection itself would be stored in the original Mulberry Street building — and to connect its historical holdings to modern cultural production, a gallery for temporary exhibitions of contemporary art. It also required administrative offices, a classroom, a bookstore, and a museum shop. The entire renovation had to stay inside a budget of just over $3 million.

Solution

Lin’s design focuses on an existing central courtyard that rises to the full height of the building. She removed obstructions erected in the space’s industrial past, uncovered a tarred-over skylight, and stripped the walls to their original brick. The space, says Lin, refers to both Chinatown’s architectural past and a Chinese courtyard house. She also opened four window frames, which look into a series of galleries that wrap around the courtyard on the street level. Glass panels suspended in each frame display projected video portraits related to objects on view in the adjacent gallery.

The main galleries allow visitors to move in a chronological sequence through the history of Chinese-American immigration and culture. But Lin also wants visitors to make lateral connections between points in that chronology by standing in the courtyard and looking at sections of the exhibition through the windows. “You should be able to see the changing face of Chinese immigration from the 1820s to the present as a collective,” says Lin.

The skylit courtyard allows daylight to penetrate into the classroom and administrative offices located on the below-grade floor. The lower level is accessible by a set of stairs made from joists salvaged from a removed section of floor. Throughout the project, Lin used only reclaimed or Forest Stewardship Council—approved wood, which, together with daylighting and other sustainable specifications, has the project on track to be LEED Silver certified.

Visitors enter through a reception area on the east side of the building. The entry is flanked by a bookstore and a wall of burnished copper panels emblazoned with the names of museum donors. The panels set the tone for the materials used throughout the project. Wood is everywhere, including the walls of the main exhibition and warm, end-grain flooring. Lin also worked with the exhibition designers Matter Architecture Practice and MGMT design, as well as Michael Bierut of Pentagram Design, on the overall palette. “We banished red from the exhibitions,” says Lin of their effort to avoid cliché. “The celadon green that we used is one of my favorite colors originating from Asia.”

Commentary

The entire renovation was completed for $3.97 million, on target with a revised budget. The project’s fiscal limitations show in some of the museum’s secondary spaces. The temporary exhibition gallery and a lower-level classroom seem conventional and closed off in comparison to the permanent collection galleries. But overall, the marriage of architecture to exhibition design and curating on a tight budget is exemplary. The scale of the galleries and the decision to keep the rough brick visible creates a physical connection between the museum’s exhibitions and its Chinatown context. And with the help of a video projection on one of the windows, the multiple storefronts allow the museum to have a strong sidewalk presence without interrupting the retail character of the neighborhood.

MOCA was a labor of love for Lin. Early in the project, when fund-raising had stagnated, she became very active in raising money to assure that it would go forward. “I think I raised a million dollars in six weeks,” she says. She even joined the museum’s board of directors in 2008 — two years after being selected to design the new space. With the active backing of a well-known designer and a new, more accessible home, MOCA seems poised for the next phase in its institutional history and the national profile that it sought when it undertook the project.

Gross square footage: 14,000 sq.ft.

Completion Date: September 2009

Total construction cost: $3.97 million

Architect:
Maya Lin Studio
112 Prince Street
New York, NY 10012
T (212) 941-6463
F (212) 941-6464

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