You’ll soon be able to walk through two acres of gallery space at Sotheby’s famous auction house.
The fine art auctioneers are upgrading and expanding their headquarters at 1334 York Avenue at a cost of $55 million.
They will increase their gallery and commercial space to 90,000 square feet from 67,000, with a total of 40 separate exhibition spaces.
The redesign will be led by Shohei Shigematsu of the Rem Koolhaas-founded firm OMA, according to a report in the New York Times. The new exhibition space is slated to open in May 2019.
Shigematsu aims to design “a series of different size and different height rooms that really create a diversity of gallery space,” he told the Times.
Sotheby’s auction sales totaled $5.3 billion last year, a 12 percent increase over 2017, the Times reports.
In 2016, The Real Deal reported that Sotheby’s had called-off a search for new headquarters, after considering a move to Hudson Yards, 399 Park Avenue or the 130,000-square-foot office-and-retail portion of 432 Park Avenue. [NYT] – Decca Muldowney