Rijksmuseum. Photo credit: John Lewis Marshall. Image courtesy of Rijksmuseum
The past six months or so have been a fine time for museum renovations. This spring, in Amsterdam, a restored, refurbished, and improved Rijksmuseum reopened after ten years of intense effort, countless delays, and vast expenditure. And late in 2012, in New Haven, the Yale University Art Gallery emerged in a new, expanded incarnation—an ensemble of three very different, now suavely linked buildings. Two neo-Gothic edifices, the 1866 Street Hall and the 1928 Old Yale Art Gallery building, have been joined to the sleek 1953 Louis Kahn building, itself beautifully brought back to Kahn’s original intentions in 2006. The good news is that both the Rijksmuseum and Yale got it right.
The Rijksmuseum has been restored and rejuvenated by the Spanish architectural firm Crux y Oriz. Courtyards have been reclaimed and roofed with skylights, allowing a flood of daylight to enliven a vast, pale stone entrance atrium created by digging down thirty feet—a major undertaking in a soggy coastal city. Divers apparently had to be used in construction. (This is not unique. Amsterdam is currently building a subway system, burrowing under the pilings of old houses in water-saturated ground and provoking, depending upon whom you talk to, enormous anxiety about possible damage to the urban fabric or enormous pride in the Netherlands’ developing a specialized technology that can be profitably exported.) In another striking change, a once awkward, claustrophobic public passage between the courtyards has been preserved—protests
