An undulating metal roof, a wooden structure with aluminium reinforcements that resembles the keel of a large ship and brick walls lifted from the most traditional local architecture. This is the new wing of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem (Massachusetts), the oldest museum in the United States and, after the extension designed by Moshe Safdie was inaugurated a few days ago, one of the largest on the entire East Coast.

It was founded in 1799 and its collections – 2,400,000 pieces spanning three hundred years of Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Indian, Oceanic and African art, architecture and culture – were started by businessmen who used to collect assorted objects and curios, exotic and non-, on their travels.

Safdie’s project cost 125 million dollars and doubles the existing space, adding 23 thousand square metres shared out among 27 new exhibition galleries, a 200-seat auditorium, a space for workshops and laboratories and a new glazed atrium 17 metres high. It combines old and new at the same time: “It's very easy to do a new wing to a museum and make it spectacular and different; then nobody ever goes to the old sections any more”, declared Safdie in a recent interview with the Boston Globe, “I wanted to make sure the old and the new really worked together”.

Peabody Essex Museum
East India Square, Salem, Massachusetts
T +1-978-7459500
https://www.pem.org