CELESTE BARTOS FILM PRESERVATION CENTER

The Celeste Bartos Film Preservation Center is the new permanent home of The Museum of Modern Art's film collection. The facility, located in Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains, dramatically expands the Department of Film and Video's storage capability in a state-of-the-art, controlled environment.

Conceived as a compound, the 38-acre pastoral site creates a cloistered environment that consists of a complex of two independent buildings. The first is designed as a two-story building within a building. This provides the temperature and humidity controlled film vaults with the buffer of a larger envelope. In addition, this main building contains the Center's Inspection and preservation laboratories, administrative and conference facilities and storage for the non-film components of the collection (printed works, posters and film-related memorabilia). The second, smaller building, houses the Museum's extremely fragile nitrate film collection. It is comprised of 32 discrete, explosion-proof vaults, each equipped with independent temperature, humidity, and fire-suppression systems.

Size: 37,500 square feet
Completion date: 1996