New York City’s Design Commission honored 11 public construction projects—including a salt shed, Diesel monitoring booth, rooftop pavilion, and community center—at the 29th Annual Awards for Excellence in Design on June 20. The awards ceremony was hosted at one of this year’s winning sites, the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, which reopened in January after a $67 million renovation largely bankrolled by the city.

Selected by an 11-member panel of architects, artists, museum representatives and city officials, the roster of winning designs includes mostly unfinished projects, such as the rehabilitation of the Delancey and Essex Municipal Parking Garage in Manhattan (Michielli + Wyetzner Architects), the construction of the Hunter’s Point Community Library in Queens (Steven Holl Architects and Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates), and reconstruction of the Staten Island Animal Care Facility (Garrison Architects).

Thomas Leeser and Karlssonwilker’s renovation of the Museum of the Moving Image—which nearly doubled its size to 97,700 square feet—employs an aesthetic reminiscent of2001: A Space Odyssey. The new entrance hall is painted white, and narrowing staircases leading to the exhibits upstairs skew depth perception a la M.C. Escher.

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The Museum of the Moving Image's renovated facade features a grid of repeating triangles made of blue-tinted aluminum.


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Across from the ticket booth, surrealist imagery is digitally projected on one of the walls of the entrance hall.


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Off the entrance hall, corridors connecting to theater and film screening spaces are saturated in magenta and royal blue lighting.


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After the awards ceremony, Steven Holl stands with a model of his winning design for Hunter’s Point Community Library, which will be built on the Queens waterfront at a former industrial site. Another Holl building—a museum dedicated to surfing and the sea—opens this weekend in the coastal city of Biarritz, France.