"Not one of New York's great cultural institutions looks today the way it did half a century ago. Since the 1970s the Metropolitan Museum has been pushing its galleries into Central Park with new glass facades; the Museum of Modern Art seems in a state of constant construction, with two towers added to West 53rd Street and another on tap; the Morgan Library gave itself a new front door into a glass atrium; and Lincoln Center has just finished a thorough makeover and expansion. Every one of these transformations has come in the bigger name of accommodating crowds that seem to grow even bigger, and while most of these new buildings and additions are visually spectacular, each of these institutions has been accused at one time or another, sometimes justifiably, of selling its soul for a mess of architectural pottage.
The one exception to the architectural deeding frenzy has long seemed to be the New York Public Library, whose great 101-year-old Carrere and Hastings palace of white marble on Fifth Avenue, arguably the city's greatest cultural building of all and sure its most beloved, looks almost exactly as it always has. It's true that the library has modernized a lot of its innards, restored the main reading room, and slipped an addition discreetly into an interior courtyard. It also dug down under Bryant Park, its backyard, to create extra storage space for books in 1991. But almost every change the library made, like the underground bookstacks, was intended to be invisible---you weren't supposed to think the library looked different, just better taken care of."
From the article, Firestorm on Fifth Avenue, by Paul Goldberger in the December 2012 issue of Vanity Fair.
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