New at Pentagram

New Work: Neue Galerie

One of the few museums devoted to early 20th century Austrian and German art and design, the Neue Galerie New York presents its collection in an exquisite setting. Opened in 2001, the museum is housed in a landmark Beaux-Arts mansion on Fifth Avenue’s Museum Mile that was built in 1914 and fully restored by the architect Annabelle Selldorf. The museum includes works by Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele, Kandinsky, Klee and Grosz, presented in an environment redolent of Vienna at the turn of the century. Abbott Miller has designed a website for the Neue Galerie that extends the museum’s unique atmosphere and beauty to its online presence.

Miller’s design for the site is an extension of the physical materiality of the building, taking its cues from the strong black, gold and wood details of the interior and building on the museum’s bold graphic identity and signage designed by Pandiscio Co. The emphatic masthead ties into the governing metaphor of the site redesign: leveraging the heritage of modernist publication design.

The redesign is highly organized and designed to function like a publication. The homepage features five sections, or modules, that are “curated” through tagging to present different aspects of museum programming. The central module is devoted to a current major exhibition, with information extrapolating outward in sidebars about the artists and related material: background information, lecture announcements, and suggestions for special items in the museum store or restaurant. Information has multiple tags, so it may reappear wherever relevant. The design allows the museum to maximize its content and creates an information space that is dynamic and constantly changing, exposing visitors to parts of the site they might not normally see.

In the museum, works from Austria and works from Germany are physically separated, with the former housed on the second floor and the latter on the third. The site continues this division in the online collection, which presents a selection of signature works in various media. The works are represented with a thumbnail, or intelligible section, of the larger work. These details open up to reveal the entire work and information about the piece and its provenance. The format allows for a consistent, grid-based arrangement of images in the galleries.

The redesign has also enhanced the museum’s online store, which features design objects made in Vienna, Berlin and other parts of Europe, including many exclusives available only through the site. Store items are tagged on the site so they appear in the featured content, increasing traffic to the online store.