Seventeenth Street off Seventh, the six floors turning around a marble and steel spiral, the galleries in deep red and saffron, the works climbing with the stair.
Donald and Shelley Rubin opened the Rubin Museum in 2004 in the former Barneys New York store at 150 West 17th Street, keeping the spiral staircase Andree Putman had designed for the store. The museum showed art of the Himalayas, Tibet and India. It closed its building in October 2024 to continue as a museum without walls, lending and touring its collection.
Source · Rubin Museum of Art ↗
The steel and marble spiral staircase inherited from the department store, the circular void it climbs through, the dark saturated gallery walls, the shrine room lit by butter lamps, the cafe at the bottom. Mood: incense and steel. Everything is procedural geometry with painted surfaces; nothing is a scan or a photograph. The room is an interpretation, and it hangs the New Yorkers the census recorded at this place first.