Period RoomsOpened October 20, 1984

At the Brooklyn Museum, the Period Rooms present a sequence of built interiors drawn from European and American domestic architecture, installed as walk-through environments. They foreground how taste was manufactured through materials, labor, and collecting, and how private spaces were used to stage public identity. In New York City museum history, such rooms reflect an early-20th-century impulse to preserve and display “heritage” by relocating it, intact, into institutions. The installation’s quiet authority can also read as a record of whose histories were deemed worth saving.