Astor Court

The Astor Court, located in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, is a re-creation of a Ming Dynasty-style, Chinese-garden courtyard.

The first permanent cultural exchange between the U.S. and the People's Republic of China, the installation was completed in 1981. Conceived by museum trustee Brooke Astor, the courtyard was created and assembled by expert craftsmen from China using traditional methods, materials and hand tools.

The design of the museum's Chinese garden is "based on a small courtyard within a scholar's garden in the city of Suzhou, China, called Wang Shi Yuan, the Garden of the Master of the Fishing Nets." Statements by officials of the museum credit Astor with the idea for the installation, stating that she recalled such gardens from a period of her childhood spent in Beijing, China, "and thought that such a court would be ideal as the focal point for the permanent installation of Far Eastern art." The museum had purchased a collection of Ming Dynasty domestic furniture in 1976 with funds in part from the Vincent Astor Foundation. The hall adjacent to the courtyard and architecturally unified with it was created to provide a suitable space to display this collection.

In 1977, Wen Fong, Special Consultant for Far East Affairs at the Metropolitan Museum and a professor at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, went to China and visited gardens in Suzhou with Professor Chen Congzhou, an architectural historian from Tongji University in Shanghai, China. It was their decision that the Late Spring Studio courtyard, a small part of the Garden of the Master of the Nets, should provide the basis of the museum's installation, for several reasons. The measurements of the small court were appropriate to the area the museum had in mind. Furthermore, its basic plan seemed to be relatively unchanged from its original construction as suggested by its "utter simplicity and harmonious proportions". Artist and stage designer Ming Cho Lee, working from various architectural sketches and photographs, created drawings and a model for the Astor Court which was shared with the Suzhou Garden Administration. Suzhou officials responded positively and offered a number of modifications, and offered photographs of Taihu rocks they proposed be part of the design, and by the end of 1978 an agreement was signed for the project.

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