Evergreen

“Inspired by the natural setting and artistic life of Long Island’s East End, the Parrish Art Museum illuminates the creative process and how art and artists transform our experiences and understanding of the world and how we live in it. The Museum fosters connections among individuals, art, and artists through care and interpretation of the collection, the presentation of exhibitions, publications, educational initiatives, programs, and artists-in-residence” 

Born in 1897 as the Art Museum at Southampton, it was established by a New York lawyer, Samuel Longstreth Parrish, to house his holdings of Italian Renaissance paintings and 19th-century plaster casts; both the building and the collection were given to the Village of Southampton after his death. In the 1950s a local philanthropist, Rebecca Bolling Littlejohn, chartered the museum as an independent entity, named it for Mr. Parrish, and endowed it with her own collection of American painting, rich in work by Impressionists like Chase and Childe Hassam, as well as local artists of the era, like Fairfield Porter and Larry Rivers. Once home to Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Roy Lichtenstein, among many others, the area has been an artists’ colony since the 19th century. Today’s residents, full time or seasonal, include Chuck Close, April Gornik, Eric Fischl, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, and Donald Sultan, as well as many more lesser-known names. In 2005 the Museum purchased fourteen acres in Water Mill, New York, and the Board of Trustees selected the internationally celebrated architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron to design a new and expanded building there. Ground was broken in July 2010, and the 34,400 square-foot building opened to the public November 10, 2012. 

Drawing inspiration from local barn houses, Herzog de Meuron envisioned a single-story structure — 94 feet wide and 634 feet long — with the building’s galleries arranged in two rows along a central corridor, designed for flexibility, with temporary walls so that the size of the rooms can be adjusted. The building is covered by two parallel pitched roofs — one for each row — with north-facing windows that take full advantage of the soft northern light. The building doubled the size of the existing facility with 12,000 square feet of flexible galleries, including the first galleries dedicated to permanent collection. The museum includes educational and multi-purpose spaces, café and kitchen. The design incorporates administrative offices and onsite space for storage and care of the permanent collection. 

To support the architect’s vision for a clean minimalist building, all mechanical equipment was tucked away in the cellar and crawl spaces. As part of design team at Buro Happold’s New York office, Mr. Morozov conceived a geothermal heating and cooling plant that took advantage of high water table below the site. Geothermal water was pumped from 6 standing column wells, circulated through reversible heat pump chillers and dumped into 6 discharge wells downstream. The reversible chillers use ground source water to generate 45-degree water in the summer and 85-degree water in the winter. For even better energy efficiency the heat pump chillers were paired with displacement ventilation. Unlike overhead air supply, displacement ventilation air cools or heats the space with moderately cool or warm air. 

Custom air-handlers also were located in the cellar spaces. Air distribution was limited to building’s perimeter with supply ducts running in the oversized crawl space.