The Met’s Islamic Wing Opens, and the Debut of the Moroccan Courtyard

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The Met’s Islamic Wing Opens, and the Debut of the Moroccan Courtyard

November 2, 2011

Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Yesterday, the Islamic Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art was re-opened, after years of renovation and expansion. Among the 12,000 works in the museum’s possession, 1,200 are currently on display in the opening exhibition, the breadth of which covers over 13 centuries of Arab art. The works on view are a testament to the varied, changing nature of a culture–by no means, monolithic–that once spread along both coasts of the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and South Asia, bound together by the written word and the geometric motif. Their synthesis is most completely evident in Islamic architecture, of which there are numerous examples present, from the so-called Damascus room–an in-tact reception hall paneled in wood and marble–to the newly constructed Moroccan courtyard, where I met with architect Achva Benzinberg Stein to discuss the project. Read on.

For the courtyard, the Met commissioned a team of Moroccan craftsmen from Fez who travailed for six months perched above the museum’s famous Greek and Roman galleries, tracing out and carving intricate patterns and interlaces, molding fresh plaster, and inlaying stones much in the manner of their 14th-century forebearers. The result is a quiet and dignified courtyard in the “medieval Maghrebi-Andalusian-style,” a complex layering of space animated by walls of color, bands of rich materials superimposed over the other, and the echoing sounds of bubbling water.

Stein, a landscape architect with expertise in Moroccan courtyard and garden design and professor at the City College of New York , was brought in to join the offices of Kevin Roche, who has steadily expanded the Met’s footprint over the last 30 years and whose associate architects worked as equal partners with Stein’s team. Together, they made several trips to Morocco to research architectural precedents for the Met courtyard, which would function as a centerpiece for the Islamic Wing galleries and to join the ranks of the museum’s other great spaces, including the Temple of Dendur and the American wing.

The space allotted for the new courtyard–a small stretch of valuable real estate which previously fulfilled the esteemed role of storage closet–was relatively constrictive. At 21-by-23 feet and with walls nearly 30 feet high, the square is considerably more diminished than the soaring heights of Moroccan quadrangles in situ (or even the Damascus Room, located just some hundred feet down the hall), meaning that the design had to be essentially scaled down in size. “It’s all about getting the proportions right,” Stein said, commenting that the idea was to “reduce the dimensions [of the archetypal Moroccan courtyard] but to be perceived as large and full.” This problematic was resolved by working with geometric motifs which could be replicated and aggrandized across all scales, from the minuscule details of the mosaics splayed along the lower register of the sidewalls to the inscriptions interwoven throughout the wooden eaves extending overhead.

Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

To create the surface decorations, including the colorful mosaics and the carved plaster panels, Stein discovered that, despite her previous experiences documenting Moroccan spaces and ornamentation, she had hit a deadlock. Both she and her Moroccan team were unable to resolve the problems of abridging the patterns from their full-sized counterparts in Morocco. Having spent much time toiling away in CAD-dimensional futility, Stein resorted to working in “the old-fashioned style,” whereby she “sat on the floor, cutting and pasting to try to figure out what I saw in my mind.” The realized surfaces are fully rendered with patterns borrowed from Alhambra, pocked with sinuous lines of arabesques and abstract forms cohabiting under the auspices of a supremely complex, yet austere order. For example, one detail from the Penrose tiling measuring approximately several inches wide is comprised of 70 individual, interlocking elements, the overall affect is that of the “illusion of nature without having nature.”

Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Working with the artisans proved fulfilling because of their commitment to the project’s realization, though that isn’t too say that directing the crew was easy. Stein wished to recreate the subdued spaces of Moroccan courts, but the workers were inclined to elaborate their carvings with amplified complexity, much in the manner of the overwhelming intricacy which has found favor with contemporary Islamic design. “By producing this elaborate complexity, these new mosques have lost some history of Moroccan art and architecture,” Stein noted. Yet, their zeal for the project was a driving force in the court’s completion and in imbuing the space with the living tradition of Islamic craftsmanship. “Architecture depends on material and, more importantly, on people who really believe in the project.”