Please note that the Hart Room and the Verplanck Room will be temporarily closed to the public through Fall 2008.
The popular American Wing period rooms offer the Museum visitor a sense of how Americans of earlier centuries lived and how they envisioned and created their domestic interiors. Arranged chronologically on three floors of the American Wing, the twenty-five rooms trace the development of American architecture and interior decoration over the last four centuries and demonstrate an evolving and increasingly self-conscious American approach to design.
The period rooms have evolved over the last seventy years and are presented today as the product of many hands—not only those who designed, built, and lived in them but also those who saved, restored, and installed them here. The Verplanck Room, for example, was created by uniting eighteenth-century New York woodwork from a country home with furnishings from the family's New York City town house to represent the design orientation of the late colonial period. The Renaissance Revival and Frank Lloyd Wright Rooms, on the other hand, are installed essentially as they were originally planned—furniture, woodwork, and decorative details all having been made specifically for these rooms to create a unified effect.
The early rooms, though distinctly American, nevertheless clearly derive from European antecedents. Pattern books played an important role in disseminating English architectural and furniture designs to America. Certain architectural details of the Richmond Room, for example, come directly from the English pattern books of William Pain.
The emergence of the American architect-designer after the Civil War is of central importance in the presentation of these rooms. The Prairie-style Frank Lloyd Wright Room from the Little house in Wayzata, Minnesota, represents the self-conscious development of a distinctly American approach to architecture and interior design.
Learn more about the American period rooms at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the people who lived in them, the architects who designed them, and all the extraordinary objects used to furnish them by exploring them in-depth in this Virtual Reality tour.
