New-look Brooklyn Museum to open.

The Brooklyn Museum, home to the second largest art collection in the United States, will opened its redesigned and renovated front entrance and new public plaza last weekend.

The design concept for this multi-staged, $63-million-dollar capital construction project was developed by Polshek Partnership Architects.

The goal of the new design was to interpret the original historic McKim, Mead & White facade and entryway.

This remarkable new entrance and plaza open up the Museum to its visitors and surrounding neighborhood in a dramatically contemporary manner, while celebrating its historic facade, said museum chair Robert S. Rubin.

"Hospitable to all visitors, this project provides one of the most important and exciting new civic spaces in New York," he said. "Combined with major changes to the interior public spaces in the recent past, the Brooklyn Museum has been dramatically propelled in to the twenty-first century."

Bovis Lend Lease provided preconstruction and construction management services to the Museum project for a historically sensitive, renewed Eastern Parkway facade, centralized entrance and plaza redesign. The original historic stairs were removed in the 1920's and the new entryway will celebrate the arrival for visitors as they approach the museum.

Using the 19th-century Beaux-Arts facade as a backdrop, a multistory sheer-glass entrance pavilion provides a dramatic architectural connection between the interior of the building and the exterior surroundings.

This transparency brings natural light into the formerly dark interior and permits visual access to the grand lobby from the front entrance, as well as from the new parking lot entrance that was completed in 2001 as the first stage of this project.

The new 15,000-square-foot Shingled-glass pavilion, recalling the staircase of the original McKim, Mead & White entrance, combined with the renovated lobby area of nearly 9,000 square feet, creates a new entrance facility, comprising close to 25,000 square feet. It more than doubles the size of the previous lobby area.

Among its new amenities are a new visitor center and expanded restroom facilities. The brick support piers that once housed the five front doors have been "excavated," restored, and left permanently exposed, showing the foundations of the institution both structurally and symbolically.

Beneath the floor of the new pavilion is a new basement area, measuring nearly 16,000 square feet, which will house the mechanical systems for new and future climate control of the building. In addition to the plaza, there are two further exterior levels.

An elevated promenade, above the new entrance pavilion, will provide inviting interior views as well as a sweeping overview of the plaza and the surrounding neighborhood.