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
http://www.pem.org
