A Beaux Arts banking hall that later served as a vast unhappy home for paying parking tickets may soon be home to a high-tech glitzy museum featuring giant-size 3D blow-ups of works by Austrian Art Nouveau painter Gustav Klimt, who likely would have hated the building’s lavish decor.
The former E
migrant Industrial Savings Bank building in Manhattan, near City Hall and other municipal office buildings, was used for city offices for a number of years until it was sold to a developer who is now turning the upper floors into condos and has leased the ground floor spaces to be turned into Hall des Lumieres.
Because the building is listed as a city landmark, permission will be needed for changes to fit the museum in, but they are likely to be approved because they are relatively minor, and preserve all of the huge space, which has 40-foot ceilings and stained glass panels, brass ornaments and intricate carvings, all of which will be retained.
As for what Klimt might have thought of the building (much less how he might have felt about having his work blown up and projected), here’s the building he and his associates of the Secession movement designed for their work, only ten years before the elaborate New York building.
