ARCHITECTURE REVIEW

Art Fuses With Urbanity in a Redesign of the

Modern
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
Published: November 15, 2004

he Museum of Modern Art is back. And just in time. The city has grown up since the
Modern shut its doors to build its new home two and a half years ago. The hole left by
the twin towers. A war in Iraq. A polarized electorate. Our culture is in a crisis as
critical as any since the cold war period when Modernism reached its final, exuberant
bloom.

That may be the reason the new Modern seems so comforting. Designed by the
Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi with Kohn Pedersen Fox, the expanded museum
is a serene composition that weaves art, architecture and the city into a transcendent
aesthetic experience. Its crisp surfaces and well-proportioned forms clean up the mess
that the building had become over the course of three expansions. No doubt the design
will breathe new life into the museum's collections, too.

The building, which reopens on Saturday, may disappoint those who believe the
museum's role should be as much about propelling the culture forward as about
preserving our collective memory. This is not the child of Alfred H. Barr Jr., the
founding director who famously envisioned the Modern movement as a torpedo
advancing relentlessly toward the future. Its focus, instead, is a conservative view of
the past: the building's clean lines and delicately floating planes are shaped by the
assumption that Modernity remains our central cultural experience. The galleries,
stacked one on top of the other like so many epochs, reinforce a hierarchical approach
to history that will bolster the Modern's image as a ruthless arbiter of taste.
But the museum essentially abandoned its claim on the future decades ago. That role
will have to be picked up by another generation and another museum. For now, we
should applaud the Modern for what it is: a monument to 20th-century values, a
precisely calibrated architectural frame whose emotional energy springs from the art it
houses. It is one of the most exquisite works of architecture to rise in this city in at
least a generation.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

The main gallery addition to the Museum of Modern Art, which reopens on Saturday, shows off
Rodin's bronze statue of Balzac in the expanded lobby and a 1946 Cisitalia 202 GT sports car two
floors above.

Up to now, the Modern has not been an ideal patron of architecture. Those who
remember Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone's 1939 museum building
claim it had a cozy, domestic scale. But it could never have contained the museum's
increasingly vast collections. The Modern got respectable additions by the architect
Philip Johnson in 1951 (since demolished) and 1964. But a hackneyed 1984 addition
by Cesar Pelli had all the appeal of a suburban mall: its dreary escalators, encased by
a greenhouselike glass atrium, seemed to confirm that the museum was more
interested in funneling as many bodies as possible through the galleries than in
fostering an intimate relationship between art and viewer. The savviest part of the
addition was the 52-story residential Museum Tower, not because it had architectural
merit but because it generated considerable revenue.

Mr. Taniguchi does not ignore this history. Instead, he preserves traces of it,
unlocking moments of beauty that seemed unimaginable before. The first clues to this
approach are visible along West 53rd Street, where the museum's entire past unfolds
in front of you, beginning with the gray glass and black granite facade of Mr.
Taniguchi's sleek new lobby and continuing with the tinted glass of the Pelli tower,
Goodwin and Stone's milky white translucent exterior, and the dark, brooding
Johnson addition of 1964. The taut composition of vertical planes hovers somewhere
between reality and abstraction.

But the full force of Mr. Taniguchi's vision is best understood from the garden, which
was once quietly tucked away at the rear of the museum. The older renovated
buildings on the east and south sides, housing the education, film and photo
departments, are now connected by a series of delicate walkways behind fretted glass
to the new six-story addition on the garden's west side, which houses the core
collection.

There are those who were terrified that the garden, which has been expanded, would
lose its intimacy. It has never looked better. The core of the original, with its
scattering of weeping beech trees and its marble bridges spanning a reflecting pool,
has been lovingly restored. To preserve its sense of scale, Mr. Taniguchi created a
series of low terraces along its edges, giving the garden a degree of visual depth it
never had and welding it more gently to the surrounding buildings. Two towering
porticoes frame the garden on either side, giving it the feel of an immense public
stage.

Rubbing Shoulders With the City

(Page 2 of 3)

This stage becomes a platform for celebrating the museum's relationship to the city. A
view of the soaring Gothic forms of St. Thomas Episcopal Church is framed by the
top of the eastern canopy and the reclad 1964 Johnson addition; the cylindrical brick
bays of the Rockefeller Apartments, the bronzed Trump Tower and the Renaissance-
style University Club are visible above the garden's 54th Street wall. The facade of
Mr. Taniguchi's addition is a shimmering glass wall, illuminating the silhouette of
Rodin's bronze statue of Balzac in the lobby and the lipstick-red form of the fabulous
1946 Cisitalia 202 GT sports car in the architecture and design department two floors
above.

But the most startling transformation involves Mr. Pelli's tower, formerly buried
behind the escalators and the old loading dock and virtually invisible from the garden.
Mr. Tanuguchi has exposed it down to its base in a corner of the garden, so that it
becomes the anchor around which the entire composition turns, locking the museum
buildings into the Midtown skyline.

In effect, what the architect has done is to bind art, architecture and the city into a
vibrantly powerful composition of overlapping images with multiple historical
meanings. The effect is hypnotic. And it is the moment when his architecture feels
most generous: it brings us closer to the art and sensitizes us to the world around us.

That notion blooms throughout the museum's expanded lobby, which now cuts
directly through the new addition from 53rd Street to 54th. A single row of white
columns march down the middle of the lobby, setting up a strong visual rhythm. As
you move deeper into the lobby, a towering atrium opens up above. Light spills
through an enormous skylight on the sixth floor, pulling the eye toward the second-
floor atrium gallery.

The view is a tease. To get to the galleries, you must turn east toward the garden, now
visible through the glass facade. From there, you turn back and climb a staircase along
the edge of the Pelli tower's base to the second-floor collections. A series of ethereal
bridges, seemingly floating in air, extend along one side of the lobby, connecting the
galleries at various levels.
The lobby evokes the openness at the heart of the new museum, its wonderful feeling
of permeability. And it reinforces the original mission of the Modern, which was
conceived as a challenge to the crusty Old World pretensions of places like the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. To that generation of Modernist pioneers, the Met's
grand entry stairs symbolized the typical museum's detachment from everyday life, its
elitist, antidemocratic values. By contrast, the revolving glass doors of Goodwin and
Stone's Modern would allow the common man to charge directly into the building.
Mr. Taniguchi's lobby takes this vision a step further: by punching right through the
Midtown block, he fuses the museum with its urban surroundings.

But the layout also suggests how the new Modern hews in many ways to the vision of
the old Met. The main painting and sculpture galleries are stacked in reverse
chronological order, with the bulk of the contemporary works on the second level;
drawings, architecture and design on the third; works from 1945 to 1970 on the
fourth; and 1880 to 1945 on the fifth. (Temporary exhibition spaces are at the very
top.)

The vertical hierarchy evokes a Darwinian climb toward the canonical works of early
Modernism. For an aspiring young artist craving acceptance, it may also bring to
mind the rings of Dante's Inferno. It reinforces the notion - in a way not sensed at the
Met today - that museums are as much about the stamp of legitimacy as about
aesthetic pleasure.

This may irritate people who believe that a 21st-century museum should take a more
populist approach. It runs counter to the idea that art, in a democracy, is a messy, open
process. And it exposes the design's overwhelming assertion of control, beautiful yet
chilling. But that is what powerful art institutions do: they set standards, they make
evaluations. You could argue that Mr. Taniguchi is stripping away the egalitarian pose
and exposing the museum for what it is.

Inviting New Connections

(Page 3 of 3)

Still, there is a sense of serendipity - however carefully engineered - in the subtle

visual associations that the layout encourages you to make among various works.
Most of the galleries are arranged around the central atrium core. As you climb from
floor to floor, views of the city gradually recede, and diagonal views open up between
the rooms, so that you are able to spot, for example, Andy Warhol's luscious "Gold
Marilyn Monroe" just beyond Kenneth Noland's "Turnsole" bull's-eye, and then,
distantly, Jasper Johns's American "Flag" several rooms away.

These juxtapositions are even more startling as you circle around to the bridges
flanking the central atrium, and peer back down several floors to take in Barnett
Newman's terrifying "Broken Obelisk," then Monet's glorious "Water Lilies," and
then a sliver of lobby. Other views cut diagonally across the atrium and between the
gallery bridges, where a distant, fractured view of the garden magically reappears. At
these moments, the building virtually dissolves into thin air.
The effect relieves the monotony of marching past an endless sequence of paintings.
But it also helps you orient yourself, so that crucial works become a recurring part of
your memory of the building. The art both draws you through the spaces and imbues
the building with unexpected lyricism.

And this may be Mr. Taniguchi's greatest accomplishment: however assertive his
design, all of the emotional power flows from the art. It is a near-perfect example of
how architecture can be forceful without competing with the art it enfolds.

In essence, the design enshrines the values that lie at the core of classical Modernism.
The early Modernists believed that architecture could not only express ideal values
but also help shape them. It could create, through form and material, a perfectly
harmonious world. Mr. Taniguchi's Modern takes this vision to its fetishized extreme
- and then locks it firmly into place.

It is a notion of aesthetic purity that seems hard to digest today. For decades now, the
most revolutionary architects have sought to probe the darker corners of the
imagination - the psychological and social conflicts that the Modernists tended to
ignore. They understand that universal truths can be elusive.

Yet it's hard not to feel nostalgia for such unalloyed idealism. Now we have a
stunning expression of that myth in the heart of Manhattan.

http://www.artsjournal.com/artsissues/redir/20041114-53142.html