The building in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, currently housing both the Queens Museum of Art and the New York City Skating Rink, was originally the New York City Building, designed and constructed for the 1939 World's Fair. The building’s east façade opens onto the park, home of the iconic stainless steel Unisphere built for the 1964 Fair held on the same site. Noteworthy among the museum’s holdings is the New York City Panorama Model, a 930-square-meter, 1:1200 scale model – another legacy of the 1964 Fair – which remains on permanent display.

A prime programmatic requirement for the renovation project was the redesign and rationalization of circulation within the museum. To create the necessary additional interior space, an existing open colonnade along the east façade was enclosed behind a new 9.1-meter-high two-story aluminum curtain wall with pre-cast concrete columns. A new north façade is clad in pre-cast concrete panels; the rest of the original building’s exterior, clad in limestone and glass masonry units, was otherwise left unchanged. Within the museum, the expanded second floor was left independent of the curtain wall. The wall, against which a dramatic ramp ascends, is thus visible in its entirety to those inside. The new east entry is centered within the façade, directly aligned with the Unisphere; an aluminum drum 5 meters in diameter incorporates a revolving door beneath a sky-lit ceiling. On the north façade, a suspended 5.5-meter-long glass and steel canopy shields another entry.