Hunting and Gathering

To remember what happens to the best laid schemes of mice and men, refer to the vast reef-like accretions that are New York City’s great museums: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The American Museum of Natural History. They tend to start out with some kind of all-purpose efficiency core in the revived Romanesque-ish or Gothic-ish styles favored between the Civil War and the Gilded Age, when the city smartened itself up after the 1865 conflagration of P. T. Barnum’s downtown cosmorama and menagerie—bogus Fiji mermaid and all. This core is likely a thriftily truncated structure made in unrealized anticipation—time and money pending—of further picturesque castellation. Over the next half century that core and any memory of its unbuilt permutation generally gets encased and submerged into a neoclassical composition in the very long shadow of the Beaux-Arts school, featuring long cross-axial pink-granite-clad wings around foursquare light courts, into which are subsequently socketed invisible brick annexes and stealthy members’ lounges and the occasion…