A Space Worthy of a Gift From Egypt
What can I say? Every time I have ever gone to the Met, my first stop before anything else, other than maybe the restroom, has always the Temple of Dendur. The room was always a place of calm in the middle of a loud and sometimes/often crazy city with its pools of water, high ceilings, and echoes of footsteps and far away voices. The temple itself was given to the U.S. by Egypt in 1965 and awarded to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1967. It then was installed in The Sackler Wing of the museum in 1978. Having said all of this, the structure was completed in 10 B.C.
In order to appreciate the grandeur of the temple, one of dozens that formed a landscape along the Nile in Lower Nubia, an airy, open, and strikingly clean-lined wing was created. While the architects could have built a much smaller gallery for the temple, they chose to create a space that would make the visitor feel like he or she was actually outdoors. The architectural firm designed the space to evoke the rocky landscape along the Nile that was its original home. I appreciate the fact that we can see the park through the massive angled windows that to me mimic the side of a pyramid. One thing that I never knew about this gallery but learned today was that the gallery was actually built around the temple after it had been rebuilt where it currently stands. Seeing as former president Lyndon B. Johnson awarded the temple to The Met, there must have been quite a lot of money put into assuring its beautiful new home.
However it was built, it will always remain my first stop every time I visit. It will always remain my quiet place in the loud city.
