Responses by Caspar Lam and YuJune Park, partners and cofounders, Synoptic Office.
Background: Neue Galerie New York is a museum for Austrian and German art of the early 20th century, located in the heart of New York City on Fifth Avenue’s famous Museum Mile. The Neue Galerie houses the largest collections of works by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele outside Vienna. It also features the Viennese-inspired Café Sabarsky and a highly curated bookstore and design shop that celebrate the history and allure of the art and culture of this particular time and place.
As for many museums and institutions, the pandemic prompted the Neue Galerie to rethink how to engage and inspire audiences that could not visit in person. Neue Galerie New York needed a practical digital platform that made its collections accessible to wider audiences but that still communicated the poetics of the art the museum offers.
Bringing these elements together through strategic design and motion, we created an immersive digital platform that shares all that the museum offers to global audiences virtually.
Design core: We wanted to communicate the sensation of exploring a physical space, so we used motion to creatively showcase content across the website. Just like in real life, the visitor finds themselves standing outside the museum on the website’s landing page and navigates, via video, through the front door into the collections and historic spaces. The use of this specific welcome video not only helps transport the visitor but showcases the museum itself: the Neue Galerie is located in one of the few surviving Gilded Age mansions on New York’s Fifth Avenue, itself a stunning work of architectural art and history.
The Neue Galerie partnered with production company SandenWolff on the videography, and the short format welcome video features were conceptualized to be as immersive as possible so the visitor truly feels like they’re entering the space.
Favorite details: All collections have a reason for being. Finding and telling that story to the visitor is integral to the success and longevity of interest in the medium. We worked closely with the Neue Galerie to translate this story on a digital platform, retaining the poetry of the collection while ensuring the site is practically functional.
Since launching the website, online visitors have increased their time spent across it by 26 percent per visit. User engagement on the storytelling pages increased upwards by 73 percent.
The new site lets the Neue Galerie become truly borderless, preserving and sharing its knowledge for the broadest possible audience. That’s what we always hope for with our work—to make collections accessible to all, to unlock the rich stream of human stories behind these masterpieces and to spark conversation. Digitalization simply means that the human spirit behind the art can impact more lives.
Challenges: The biggest challenge we had with the site was trying to capture the jewel-box experience that visitors encounter when they visit the museum in person. The sensory delights—from the art and architecture to the café—at the Neue Galerie transport visitors to another time and place. Translating this to the screen was one of the most difficult but delightful parts of the project.
Navigation structure: As with all digital collections, site architecture was key to ensuring an enjoyable experience for the visitor. Navigation needed to be clear and easy while still telling the story of the collections. We wanted the platform to invite visitors to explore all aspects of the museum experience—exhibitions, public programs, dining and shopping—without navigating away from the artwork itself. These different parts of the experience—the art forms and creative processes working together to create a cohesive whole—are referred to as a Gesamtkunstwerk, which, in German, translates roughly to “a total work of art.”
We wanted the website to be a true extension of the museum, to somehow capture that Gesamtkunstwerk experience for the online visitor where culture, history and the art works live side by side. We integrated a related objects module into every page to improve visitor circulation around the site, enabling users to go seamlessly from an exhibition to the shop, for example, and vice versa. It is also an invitation to continue the experience offline with a beautiful, physical object linked to the collections.
Technology: One of the most unique technical features of the site is that the museum site and its e-commerce store are fully integrated. We were able to leverage a robust API to connect the Neue Galerie’s e-commerce system with a headless CMS so that visitors never have to leave the site. Learning about the collections and finding a way to bring home a piece of history through the e-shop are seamlessly integrated into the online visitor experience.