Our Excursions to the Metropolitan Museum of Art

“We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it).”
– Alain de Botton

Inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art

“The facade and walls of a house, church, or palace, no matter how beautiful they may be, are only the container, the box formed by the walls; the content is the internal space.”
– Bruno Zevi, (1918 – 2000), from The Architect Says:  Quotes, Quips and Words of Wisdom, ed. Laura S. Dushkes

What I loved best about the Metropolitan Museum of Art was the mood experience of the spaces, which were majestic, spiritual, uplifting, vast.  There was such a sense of spaciousness housing the innumerable art treasures.  This seemed such a contrast to the cramped private space in my niece’s 4th floor walk-up apartment in the East Village.  Maybe New Yorkers go to museums like the Met in part to escape the close confines of their personal living situations.

We did not have any particular pieces in mind to see at the Met, but rather wandered the maze of rooms, stopping whenever something in the collection caught our hearts and eyes.  My husband actually asked if we could return a second day to this museum, which we did the morning before we departed the city.

Here are some impressions:

(At this point in our trip, my digital SLR camera broke, so all of these images were taken on my iPad 2.)

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