The Museum of Modern Art – New York, NY, USA

Customer and Site Information

The Museum of Modern Art opened at 11 West 53rd Street in 1939 and expanded in 2019 into adjacent space, adding gallery area and improving visitor circulation. The campus runs to more than 700,000 square feet of galleries, offices and public space.

A museum imposes a constraint that most commercial buildings do not. Temperature and humidity stability is a conservation requirement rather than a comfort question, and the building cannot be taken offline to make the change.

Advanced Integration and Customer Requirements

AME modernised the museum’s building systems while the museum stayed open and the mechanical plant stayed in service. The controlling requirement was continuity: the air conditioning was never shut down during the work.

• Retrofit from legacy Honeywell controls onto a Tridium Niagara platform.
• Fault detection and analytics deployed to support proactive maintenance rather than reactive callouts.
• Plant systems brought onto the platform including chillers, cooling towers, boilers, air handling units, variable air volume terminals and metering.
• Cooling tower replacement delivered as a separate award.
• Controls work at 4 West 54th Street.

Ongoing Partnership

AME holds a three-year maintenance agreement covering the museum and continues to quote further work on site.

Innovative Features

• A controls retrofit executed in a continuously occupied museum with no interruption to conditioned air.
• Fault detection and analytics layered over the building management system, surfacing waste that a conventional building management system reports as normal operation.
• Legacy Honeywell field devices carried forward onto an open Niagara platform rather than replaced wholesale.