Samuel Anderson Architects

Samuel Anderson Architects is a New York architecture practice specializing in museums, libraries and archives, with a focus on collections storage and conservation environments. The firm works on the technical side of cultural buildings: controlled-environment storage for works on paper, books and manuscripts, conservation laboratories, and the mechanical and envelope problems that come with putting modern climate control inside historic structures. The practice is working on The Huntington’s $126.6 million renovation in San Marino, California, handling the collections storage and conservation studio scope alongside design lead Robert A.M. Stern Architects. It’s a small studio based in Midtown Manhattan.

The client list is the fastest way to understand what this office actually does. Harvard Art Museums, the Morgan Library & Museum, SFMOMA, the Whitney, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Barnes Foundation, the American Antiquarian Society, LACMA, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation have all been clients. So have Yale, Oberlin College, the University of Pennsylvania, Georgetown, Hunter College and the Fashion Institute of Technology, along with the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt in Long Island City and Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.

Continuity runs deep in the studio. Senior Associate Edward Gormley joined in 1995 and has served as project executive or project manager on the Barnes Foundation, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg expansion and Yale’s West Campus center for conservation and preservation, and he has led nine Smithsonian IDIQ commissions over the past decade. Mandi Lew, a licensed architect in New York and California, arrived in 2007 and concentrates on collections care and sustainability, including the matting, framing and mount-making spaces most architects never think about. Associate Kayt Brumder came in 2010 and has delivered galleries, storage, lecture halls and board rooms for the Frick Collection, the Brooklyn Museum, the Hispanic Society of America and the Museum of Nebraska Art. Principal Samuel Anderson has taught building technology and the third-year integrated design studio at the Cooper Union for more than twenty years.

Recognition has arrived from both sides of the field. The American Institute for Conservation gave Anderson its Allied Professionals Award in 2020, an honor it reserves for non-conservators who move the discipline forward. The American Antiquarian Society work took a 2019 AIA Central Massachusetts Merit Award and a 2022 Worcester Preservation Award for compatible construction, and the Penn Museum West Wing renovation won a Preservation Alliance of Greater Philadelphia Grand Jury Award in 2016. Earlier projects at Harvard’s Straus Center and the Morgan’s Thaw Conservation Center were published in Architectural Record and covered by the New York Times.

Not all of it is institutional. The office has done Manhattan and Brooklyn apartments, offices for Broadway producers and ticketing companies including Richard Frankel Productions, Theater Direct and Showtix, work at the Cherry Lane Theatre, and commercial space for kpe in Los Angeles. Staff work in English, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Albanian, Hebrew and Italian. General inquiries go through office manager Maria Baker at the West 38th Street studio.