Parrish Wins Architectural Award

The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill was recently voted the best of the best in the 10th annual Travel + Leisure magazine international design competition.

The work of the architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron, which designed the museum, was noted as “the best new examples of design” by a six-member jury of design professionals, which included Kathy Halbreich, Mary Margaret Jones, Thom Browne, Ilse Crawford, Morris Adjmi and Jerome Griffith.

The Parrish Art Museum was the only winner from the United States. The contest is currently featured in the February issue of Travel + Leisure.

Museum Director Terrie Sultan accepted the award at a presentation ceremony on January 30, at TORO restaurant in Manhattan. The event included a video commentary on each of the winners by the competition jurors, as well as short presentations by Nancy Novogrod, Travel + Leisure’s Editor-in-Chief, and Thomas Pritzker, executive chairman of Hyatt Hotels Corporation and supporter of the renowned Pritzker Architecture Prize.

“We are thrilled to be recognized by this prestigious award, and proud of our museum and the wonderful architecture that was truly ‘purpose built’ in such a way as to fully integrate the mission and core values of the institution and the special nature of our environment,” said Ms. Sultan. “Art, architecture and nature are holistically integrated to provide an experience not to be had elsewhere.”

“Many of this year’s favorites will come as no surprise, including the Herzog & de Meuron-designed Parrish Art Museum,” touts the Travel + Leisure website. In the online article, the museum was described as “brave enough to be humble” in the “land of riches that is the East End of Long Island.”

“Harking back to the agricultural structures that once dominated the landscape, the [Parrish] museum’s shape evokes that of a barn, if an extraordinarily long, twin-gabled, and finely detailed one. The line it draws in an open meadow is striking in its simplicity; inside, the central corridor is flanked by galleries, while a wide, covered terrace at one end extends a friendly invitation to step into a world of American art,” the article states.

The 34,400-square-foot building, which opened in November 2012, was the first art museum built on the East End of Long Island in more than a century. The new building provides 12,200 square feet of gallery space, much of which is dedicated to installations of the museum’s permanent collection, which includes nearly 3,000 works from the 19th century to the present.