July 6th marked the long-awaited public opening of New York City’s new Louis Armstrong Center in Queens, culminating a 17-year journey to properly honor the legacy of the man called 'Satchmo' in the neighborhood he proudly made his home from 1943 until the music finally ended in 1971.

The small, 14,000-square-foot design from Caples Jefferson is located the directly across 107th Street street from the storied musician’s landmarked former residence (now the Louis Armstrong House Museum) in the still heavily working-class section of Corona, Queens.

The project was thus conceived to be an interpretive welcoming center to the museum’s visitors, with a documentary archive, exhibition area, and live jazz room all tucked into its eye-catching bronze-colored faceted flat glass façade envelope.

The architects explain: "In order to expand the capacity of this relatively modest house museum, our firm, Caples Jefferson, designed a new visitor center to allow many more people to appreciate the legacy of Louis Armstrong, the man and the music. He was both down-home and revolutionary and this building reflects that. We wanted to keep the building at the scale of the modest neighborhood that he loved, while creating an urban precinct for his storyand his music that welcomes in all visitors. The building is a golden beacon, by day and by night, that proclaims this genius who lived in our midst."

Visitors can encounter the two-room sequence of educational and exhibit spaces before reaching the final 75-seat Jazz Room, whose deep-red painted walls and mahogany embossed backdrop are designed to evoke the myriad American and European music clubs in which Armstrong's legacy and reputation were established.

A green roof completes the design when viewed from the second-level conservator’s workroom. Finally, a reading room for visiting researchers offers the archive’s 60,000-piece collection next door.

The project was completed at a cost of $16.45 million and achieved a LEED-Silver certification.