The Museum of the City of New York undertook this first-ever permanent exhibition of New York City’s 400-year history in a three-year, iterative, and radically selective process with a multi-disciplinary design team. Due to the city’s ever-evolving nature, a major design challenge was to continue the four curatorial themes—money, diversity, density, and creativity—across the past, present, and future. The large-scale endeavor also required the Herculean task of organizing data and designing appropriate casework for 400 unique objects and multimedia elements. The primary challenge was to ensure visual and curatorial compatibility between the three main galleries while providing unique experiences bespoke to content. The story is told through object-rich analog displays coupled with immersive media in an all-encompassing environment, dramatic in its modernity and reductive in materiality. A palette of materials and textures unites diverse delivery methods. Formal simplicity of planning relies on a base framework of symmetry and balance. In the end, it is the accuracy of each detail, both virtual and physical, that enrichens this highly focused curatorial narrative.
