The majority of the museum's extensive collections are housed in mid-1950s and 1960s buildings designed by a New York-based civil engineer, Walter Binger. The recent visitor center (1999-2000), designed by the Boston firm of Ann Beha Architect, forms a suitably impressive portal to the compound and an effective buffer to the car lot and parking deck. The museum grounds harbor a spectrum of 19th- and 20th-century structures \u2013 some original to the site, others moved there \u2013 that embody examples of building in the region no longer found elsewhere or seldom seen by the public. A few interesting structures have been designed recently for the museum to serve as outdoor demonstration facilities. <\/p>
Among buildings originally located on the site, arguably the most important is the Log Hotel, erected for Tyler Merwin in 1876 as an annex to his Blue Mountain House and restored by the museum after it acquired the property in 1954. It affords a good sense of the pioneer hotels otherwise known only through old photographs. Adjacent is the Artist's Cottage, constructed around 1905 for painter Gustav Adolf Wiegand, who from about 1900 through the 1920s was available to hotel guests who wanted instruction. Below the hotel is the rustic gazebo, a 1988 replication of the late 19th-century structure on the site. On the hillside to the north lies Bull Cottage, built on the grounds for a minister, Clarence Bull, around 1899-1900, with large stone chimneys, split logs that retain their bark, and diamond-pane windows, all common features of rustic architecture in the region at the turn of the 20th century. It was purchased by the museum in 1981. Directly above, the Moodie Cottage (ca. 1906), another residence built on the hotel grounds, is not yet publicly accessible. <\/p>
Sunset Cottage, a small, sheltered retreat sheathed in dazzling patterns of stickwork, was built in the 1880s as part of Camp Cedars, Frederick Clark Durant's camp at Forked Lake. Severely damaged by a blow-down in 1950, all but this small structure at the camp was demolished. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney moved it to his Camp Deerlands thereafter. His widow, Mary Lou Whitney, donated it to the museum in 1995. Nearby, the Reising Schoolhouse (1905) was built in a remote part of the Town of Ohio and operated until 1945. It was donated to the museum in 1987. Below, the Buck Lake Club is of recent vintage, constructed in the 1960s by Mike Virkler as a hunting camp on Buck Pond in the Town of Webb. It was given to the museum after the state acquired the leased land on which it stood in 1985. Behind the visitor center is a fire tower (1919) of a standardized design, but unusually low owing to the absence of vegetation atop its original site on Whiteface Mountain. It was the first structure relocated to the museum grounds, in 1971. <\/p>
To the east of Bull Cottage is the Environmental Pavilion (1988), a play on a polygonal gazebo, here greatly enlarged in scale as well as in dimensions to accommodate school groups and other visitors. The architect, Thomas Chapin of Cambridge, New York, and a former employee of William G. Distin's successor firm, Wareham, De Lair, also designed the Marion River Carry Pavilion (1991), a muscular assemblage of log posts and trusses with iron chains as ties that shelters boats and boat-building demonstrations. Across the pond is a lean-to (1992), built by Tom Andrews as an exemplary illustration of structures common to camps of all sizes and a quintessential emblem of the Adirondacks. <\/p>
The museum has never had a long-range plan for the acquisition of historic structures or for the replication of others. Those that have been moved to the site were determined on a case-by-case basis. Aside from the hotel annex and Wiegand's cabin, including historic structures was not part of the initial scheme. The limitations imposed by the property's size and terrain precluded siting these moved structures in a way suggestive of their original environments.
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