With a limited budget and initially scant collection, the design of this small museum involved a speculative approach to its galleries. A series of four cantilevered boxes are interconnected around an atrium sculpture court. Each of a different size and ceiling height, these galleries rise above a 5-foot podium housing museum services and public spaces accessible after the main galleries are closed. 

Like a piece of sculpture installed in a plaza, the museum’s compact size and attention to detail make the three-story building the focal point within a larger civic and cultural complex. Poured-in-place concrete mixed with a local granite aggregate complements Syracuse’s numerous sandstone buildings.

With a collection focused largely on American art and ceramics, the Everson Museum exists as a structure that is more than just a vault for art. Designed in 1968 by I.M. Pei, the structure sought to simultaneously challenge the traditional museum typology through its innovative form while also existing as an object of modern art in its own right. Pei conceived the Everson as an open structure with access to its interior from all of its exposed sides.

The building is primarily comprised of four opaque concrete volumes that surround an open atrium that visitors move through to access the galleries. Each volume contains galleries of differing size and height that when viewed from outside gives added hierarchy to the overall assemblage of forms that makeup the museum. A cantilevered second story adds further differentiation to the building from the surrounding landscape.