Period Rooms
The Brooklyn Museum collection includes twenty-three complete period rooms. In order to preserve these premier examples of American architecture and interior design, these rooms were disassembled and moved from their original locations up and down the East Coast, then reassembled and furnished for display in the galleries.
The Jan Martense Schenck House represents the oldest architecture in the Museum’s period room collection. It is also the most complex of the period rooms in terms of reconstruction and interpretation. The house is a simple two-room structure with a central chimney. Its framework is composed of a dozen heavy so-called H-bents, visible on the interior of the house, that resemble goal posts with diagonal braces. This is an ancient northern European method of construction that contrasts with the boxlike house frames that evolved in England. The house had a high-pitched roof that created a large loft for storage. The roof was covered with shingles, and the exterior walls were clad with horizontal wood clapboard siding. A section of the clapboard has been removed at one corner to expose a reconstruction of the brick nogging used as insulation. The interior walls were stuccoed between the upright supports of the H-bents.
This is a very interesting jewelry exhibit of jewelry from the 1960’s. The exhibit features various photographs of jewelry from the era, and the jewelry itself all created by Arthur Smith. Twenty one pieces were recently given to the museum by Charles Russel. The work over all has a very surreal feel to the jewelry much of which seemed to be much ahead of its time, some pieces even seeming very futuristic in a certain sense with there biomorphic shapes and polished steel looks.
