Volume 52, Number 1 · January 13, 2005
Red-Hot MoMA
By Charles Rosen, Henri Zerner
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Yoshio Taniguchi, architect
Modern Painting and Sculpture: 1880 to the Present at the Museum of Modern Art
edited by John Elderfield
The Museum of Modern Art,536 pp., $65.00
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has changed radically over the years since it was founded in 1929 and moved into its own building on 53rd Street in 1939. What is most striking in the new building that has just opened is the change of scale. For it is, indeed, a new building. The original one on the same site by Edward Durell Stone underwent two successive expansions, in 1964 by Philip Johnson and 1984 by Cesar Pelli. The last was a spectacular failure: it mainly increased the number of small and rather intimate enclosed spaces used to show pictures, and the effect was numbing. The lobby, in the style of a commercial mall, with a highly visible escalator that obstructed the view of the much-loved sculpture garden, did not help. And the space was rapidly seen to be insufficient for the needs of the institution. Having purchased the adjacent Dorset Hotel, the board decided that this time the museum should not be just expanded, but largely gutted and rethought. The result is a grand and elegant creation that incorporates the old façades on 53rd Street but completely transforms the interiors and the garden façades on 54th Street. The architect, Yoshio Taniguchi, a surprising and controversial choice, was known up to then only for his imaginative designs for museums in his native Japan.
Review, 5352 words
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