MoMA's Proposed Expansion - Radical 75 Storey Tower - by Jean Nouvel

[Edward]

From artnet.com:

MoMA's new architect

by Walter Robinson *

In keeping with its global vision of the 21st-century art museum, the Museum of Modern Art has chosen Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi to design its new expansion and renovation. Tanaguchi's design will reshape the entire museum, moving the main entrance around to 54th Street, restoring the museum's famous garden to its original proportions and adding a new grand stairway and entrance atrium. Major new construction will include the addition of a seven-story annex structure for painting and sculpture galleries on the present site of the Dorset Hotel.

The redesign makes the garden central to the museum's reconfigured ground floor spaces, and also brings the lines of Cesar Pelli's 52-story museum tower down to grade level, emphasizing the "urban character" of the museum, as MoMA architecture curator Terry Riley put it. The project calls for underground excavation on both the Dorset Hotel site and under the garden to create a new theater and an expanded department of video and film. The Goodwin-Stone facade, presently entrance to the museum proper, will be restored as the entrance to the film center. And MoMA's original "Bauhaus" staircase will once again become an integral connection between the galleries.

Taniguchi's plan expands MoMA's present 86,000 square feet of gallery space to 133,000 square feet. But additional design refinements are expected in the coming months, according to MoMA director Glenn Lowry. What's the expansion's pricetag? The museum isn't saying yet, but it will "be less than the Getty," joked MoMA chairman Ronald Lauder at the press conference, in reference to the $1-billion J. Paul Getty Center opening this week in Los Angeles. When will it be finished? MoMA professes similar uncertainty as to the exact date, but Lauder has challenged Lowry to have it done in time for the museum's 75th anniversary in 2004. "What's great about this plan, nobody can explain," said the architect Philip Johnson, who designed MoMA's first expansion in 1951. "You will walk in and be smitten by art."

This project is Taniguchi's first in the U.S. He has done a number of museums in Japan, including the Nagano Prefectural Museum (1990), the Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum (1988-81), the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art (1991-95) and the Gallery of the Horyuji Treasures now under construction at the Tokyo National Museum.

The two other finalists in MoMA's competition were Columbia University architecture dean Bernard Tschumi and the Swiss architectural team of Herzog and de Meuron. The museum's architect selection committee consisted of MoMA trustee Sid Bass, who served as chairman, plus Lauder, museum president Agnes Gund, MoMA chairman emeritus David Rockefeller, Marshall Cogan and Jerry Spier.

WALTER ROBINSON is editor of ArtNet Magazine.


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The view on the MoMA (http://www.wirednewyork.com/museums/moma/default.htm) construction site on 3 February 2002.

http://www.wirednewyork.com/museums/moma/images/moma_renovation_3feb02.jpg

http://www.wirednewyork.com/museums/moma/images/moma_w54th_3feb02.jpg

http://www.wirednewyork.com/museums/moma/images/moma_w53rd_3feb02.jpg

[Edward]

MoMA (http://www.wirednewyork.com/museums/moma/default.htm) construction site on 24 March 2003. The view from West 54th Street.

http://www.wirednewyork.com/museums/moma/images/moma_expansion_24march03.jpg

[TLOZ Link5]

Interesting.

You know, Pelli's Museum Tower was actually the world's tallest apartment tower upon its completeion, up until 1993 when Hong Kong built a taller building.

According to skyscrapers.com, that is:

World's 100 Tallest Residential Buildings (http://skyscrapers.com/re/en/bu/sk/st/tp/rs/2/)

[Kris]

April 7, 2004

The Modern's Old Home Is Almost Habitable

By CAROL VOGEL

The Museum of Modern Art will reopen on Nov. 20 after completion of an ambitious $858 million renovation and expansion of its West 53rd Street home, nearly doubling its capacity. No admission will be charged on opening day, a Saturday, museum officials said.

The museum increased its construction team in January by about 100, so there is now a crew of about 530 workers racing to complete the building, which has been designed by the Tokyo-based architect Yoshio Taniguchi.

Last week the scaffolding was removed on the building's 54th Street side. Inside, the shell of the museum is beginning to take shape. Now visible is the layout of its 12,400-square-foot lobby, with spaces for its coat check as well as its ticket and information booths. One wall is being prepared to hold nine plasma screens that will give visitors running information about current exhibitions, hours, ticket prices and events.

For the first time in its 75-year history, the museum will cut through an entire city block, with four revolving glass doors at each of its two main entrances, one on West 53rd Street and the other on West 54th. Twelve thousand five hundred square feet of green slate has been brought in from Vermont and is being laid on the building's main floor. Black granite has just been installed on some of the lobby's walls.

The new museum encompasses about 630,000 square feet of new and renovated space on six floors. The total exhibition space will increase to 125,000 square feet from 85,000 square feet, with galleries nestled around a 110-foot-tall atrium, which has views of the city from each floor. The museum's Bauhaus Stair, with its black terrazzo treads and stainless-steel handrails made for the Modern's original 1939 building by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, is being restored and reinstalled to link the second and third floors.

Before the renovation, the museum had little space to show many of its monumental contemporary sculptures, but the new contemporary-art galleries, on its second floor, have ceilings almost 22 feet high and a 250-pound-per-square-foot loading capacity. Loading elevators are so large that they can fit three massive steel sculptures by Richard Serra at once, museum officials say.

The Modern will still have its famed sculpture garden, but the new space, which is under construction, will be 20 percent larger. Even in the renovation's raw state, it is possible to see other symbols of the old Modern. The Bell-47D1 helicopter will be suspended over a bridge by the architecture and design galleries on the building's third floor. This 1945 aluminum, steel and acrylic contraption, with its transparent plastic bubble, nicknamed the bugeyed helicopter because of its insectlike appearance, was acquired by the museum in 1984 and had sat over the architecture and design galleries of its former home.

In addition to the reinstallation of the museum's permanent collection, when it opens its third-floor temporary exhibition space, it will include one show: "Nine Museums by Yoshio Taniguchi," an exhibition on the other museums the architect has designed over the last 25 years.

Two years ago, MoMA QNS, its temporary home in an old staple factory in Long Island City, opened to display portions of the museum's collection as well as temporary exhibitions. The Queens facility will stay open through Sept. 27 and then revert to a study and storage facility. So for nearly two months, there will be no Museum of Modern Art.

(The cost of the free day is being covered by JPMorgan Chase, where the museum's chairman emeritus, David Rockefeller, served as chairman for 12 years.)

In 1998 the Museum of Modern Art began a capital campaign drive to pay for the project and raise its endowment. Initially its goal was $650 million, but three years ago that was raised to $858 million, of which about $675 million has been raised so far. More than $456 million has come from the museum's board. "Fifty trustees contributed $5 million or more," said Glenn D. Lowry, the Modern's director. "And the momentum hasn't stopped."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company


http://moma.org/about_moma/building/index.html

[Kris]

May 5, 2004

The Modern's Cool New Box: Displaying Art, Not Fighting It

By SARAH BOXER

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/05/05/arts/05moma.jpg
A digital image, looking east from the atrium's second floor in the Modern's new building.

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/05/05/arts/05MOMA2.jpg
A digital image looking west at the building from the Sculpture Garden.

"This is not destination architecture," Glenn D. Lowry, the director of the Museum of Modern Art, said, looking at his unfinished new building. "It is a museum."

After seeing what a gleaming, eccentric museum like Frank Gehry's Guggenheim could do for a city like Bilbao, Spain, every museum director seemed poised to hire a signature architect, a Daniel Libeskind or a Frank Gehry, to design a showpiece. Every museum, that is, but the Museum of Modern Art. It has held fast to the cool white box.

"A museum is not architecture, and it is not a collection," Mr. Lowry said. "It is both." A museum, in other words, should not compete with its art.

The new Modern, by Yoshio Taniguchi, a Japanese architect who has never before designed a building outside Japan, will more than double the museum's gallery space and alter its configuration, lengthen the garden, add an atrium and highlight contemporary art. Construction costs are estimated at $425 million.

But one thing will not change. The building will be thoroughly modern. The midtown Modern, scheduled to open in late November after being closed for two and a half years, is 630,000 square feet of straight walls, floors and ceilings with no obtrusive columns or dead-end hallways. It is a building with "a harmonic precision," Mr. Lowry said.

But simple architecture is not always simple. Making a precise, rectilinear museum in a city that refuses to bend very much requires lots of logistical contortions. To cite a small example, the builders had to cut a notch out of one of museum's facades to preserve the view of St. Thomas Church from 54th Street. And in New York City many unions are involved, each with its own schedule. That makes a precisionist structure, where quarter-inch goofs can throw off the whole thing, extremely tricky to build.

The museum looks far from finished. There are remnants of corn bread on the stairs, girly pictures on the unfinished walls, salsa playing on boom boxes, lighting being tested on Matisse posters, and plaster, plywood, granite and graffiti everywhere. This is the time when you can see everything that is going on under all those straight walls, windows and floors to keep the surfaces smooth and pure.

The first and biggest obstacle to the Modern's seamlessness was the 54-story residential tower between the old and the new parts of the museum. The goal was to allow visitors to pass from old to new without ever knowing they had left the museum, Mr. Lowry said. But the tower, with its 248 residents, could not be razed. So the Modern got permission to "slice through the tower," Mr. Lowry said, "to penetrate the four feet of concrete that supported the tower." To insure that the tower, pierced by the Modern's passages and escalators, would not collapse, steel braces had to be installed in the lower nine floors.

The new building's centerpiece is the second floor. The grand Zimbabwean black granite stairway leads here from the garden level. This is where the multistory atrium takes off. And this is the huge space for the museum's permanent collection of contemporary art, a 20,000-square-foot gallery that is strong enough and big enough to hold three Richard Serra sculptures.

Mr. Lowry seemed particularly proud that this gallery and the sixth-floor space for temporary exhibitions have no columns. To accomplish this, he explained, engineers had to rig an armature above the eighth floor from which to hang the lower floors.

"Maybe I'm jaded about the magic of all that," said Gregory Clement, the managing principal architect with Kohn Pedersen Fox, the New York firm that has been working with Mr. Taniguchi since the beginning. "It is one of those things that is done all the time."

Mr. Clement seemed more excited to point out the small, often invisible things that were done to realize Mr. Taniguchi's ideas. The new building, he explained, not only looks minimalist but is, from top to bottom, inside and out, conceptually and in the details.

Mr. Taniguchi's palette is minimalist, Mr. Clement explained: silver anodized aluminum panels mark the entrances and cover the canopies over the garden; a translucent milky-looking glass veils the older parts of the Modern; and black granite and gray glass cover the new east and west wings.

Another feature of Mr. Taniguchi's reductive aesthetic is that every turn in the building is marked by a change in materials, so that it looks not like a solid block but a series of monochromatic planes. Of course each seemingly unitary plane is made up of many glass panes or stone slabs. But in Mr. Taniguchi's plan the joints are minuscule.

Mr. Clement pointed to the black granite slabs that cover much of new building. Most buildings, he said, would have 3/8 inch to 1 1/4 inches of space between the slabs. That's what you need to allow for slight variations in the way the stone panels are cut and installed and for shifts under varying loads. "We got the joints down to one-quarter to three-eighths inch," he said, by adding spandrel beams that take some of the weight of the wall. (Spandrel beams connect the columns at the outer edge of the structural frame.)

Mr. Lowry noted that Mr. Taniguchi was given few directives. One was to keep the garden "exactly as it was." Another was to make sure the building would be "suffused with light." Thus two huge windows, nearly floor to ceiling, face each other at opposite ends of the Sculpture Garden. Both are topped by anodized aluminum canopies. Both rise straight up from the ground level to the sixth floor. And in this case, Mr. Lowry noted, straight really does mean straight. "We designed it so that the facade has zero-degree deflection. There's no bow."

Mr. Clement indicated that the real feat with the windows lay elsewhere. The glass walls, he said, float free from the floor, appearing to be autonomous planes. And to make things more challenging yet, Mr. Taniguchi wanted the mullions between the panes of glass to be as slim as possible, slimmer than the usual 3 1/2 to 4 inches. That meant that a conventional aluminum system would not be strong enough. Steel mullions had to be used.

The same rectilinear precision goes for the ceilings and walls of the galleries. Although they are nothing but sheetrock with a plaster skin, they had to be absolutely straight. Mr. Lowry pointed out a reveal between a wall and doorway that narrowed toward the bottom. "This is not acceptable," he said. He then showed how some ring-shaped fittings for smoke detectors and sprinklers did not sit smoothly in the ceiling. "Most people won't see this," he said, but cumulatively they will pick up on it. Either it's "a quiet ceiling" or there's a disturbance.

Even the floors should feel quiet, Mr. Lowry said. Most of the gallery floors are simple oak, but they hide a complex layering. At the bottom is concrete. On top of that are sleepers, planks fitted with rubber runners. On top of that is a grid of boards, stuffed with sound insulation. Then there's a plywood base and finally the oak. The result: "The floor has give to it," Mr. Lowry said. It's a quiet walk.

Given all this rectilinear rigor, it is odd that the museum has bent so far on one point. It has given up the idea that the history of modern art is a straight course, a simple, triumphant narrative. The old building had one way into each gallery, Mr. Lowry said. The story the museum told, he added, "was too reductive, too simple." So this time the Modern decided to make its galleries porous. In other words, "there's not a single linear route."

Although you can take what Mr. Lowry called the "synoptic route," which begins with contemporary art on the second floor and moves back to the earliest Modern Art on the fifth, you don't have to stay on the path. A variety of stairs, escalators and elevators connects all the floors. "We don't want people to feel they're on a train," Mr. Lowry said. "Art history is not a linear process."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

MoMA and the Mob (http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/trends/columns/cityside/9265/index.html)
In a shed on the museum’s construction site, Carl Carrara painted a vivid, obscene picture of mob life—and the Feds taped it all.

[Kris]

June 9, 2004

More Than Child's Play: Making Over the Modern

By CAROL VOGEL

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/06/08/arts/09moma.l.jpg
Hope Cullinan of the Museum of Modern Art staff adjusts miniatures of artworks on a model of the museum, which is being expanded and will reopen in November.

In a windowless office in Queens, five curators are poring over an 18-foot-long model of the new painting and sculpture galleries at the Museum of Modern Art's vastly expanded West 53rd Street home, which will reopen in November. They are like children playing with a doll's house, but instead of make-believe furniture, their toys are the greatest collection of modern art in the world. Ever so delicately, tiny reproductions of "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" by Picasso, "The Dance" by Matisse and "Flag" by Jasper Johns have been taped to the walls.

There are also miniature sculptures by Judd and Flavin and even Claes Oldenburg's whimsical giant ice-cream cone reduced to the size of a thumb. As the curators work, some of the sculptures are accidentally knocked over in the process of rehanging some of the paintings — faces cringe. What looks like a game is actually serious work.

"The last chapter of the story is always the most difficult," said John Elderfield, the Modern's chief curator of painting and sculpture, who has been reluctant to reveal his plans for reinstalling the collection. "You have to think what to leave people with."

It is a daunting task: to use the museum's vast collection to tell the history of modern art in new and unfamiliar galleries.

Not only has the museum's collection grown and changed enormously since the institution's founding in 1929, but so has the way that people look at art.

"We're talking to a younger and in many ways better-educated audience but one that is not necessarily more sophisticated," said Glenn D. Lowry, the Museum of Modern Art's director. "We're trying to lay out the history of the Modern while recognizing that it's a provisional history, one that has not been fully written and one that will continue to change and evolve."

The museum is also playing to a far larger audience, one that has nearly doubled over the last 10 years.

Mr. Lowry and his curatorial team have been grappling with the challenge of creating a new Modern since 1996 when the museum bought the neighboring Dorset Hotel along with two adjacent brownstones and embarked on an $858 million renovation and expansion.

Designed by the Japanese architect Yoshi Taniguchi, the new museum is an elegantly minimal building of black granite, dark gray, clear and etched glass with about 63,000 square feet of new and renovated spaces on six floors. The exhibition space alone has grown to 125,000 square feet from 85,000 square feet with galleries clustered around a soaring 110-foot-tall atrium.

And what will go where in those galleries? While the curators have a general idea of how they want the galleries to look, none will discuss specifics, saying that until they get the art into the new space they cannot tell exactly what will go where. But some logical chronologies will occur, they say, beginning with seminal late 19th-century and early 20th-century paintings like "The Bather" by Cezanne (1885) and "The Starry Night" by van Gogh (1893) straight through to more contemporary work from Rachel Whiteread, Takashi Murakami and Damien Hirst.

The design of the new galleries, the curators say, gives visitors the option of following the collection historically or picking specific sections that will be able to stand on their own.

What visitors will see when the museum opens to the public on Nov. 20, Mr. Lowry said, is simply one installation that will be constantly evolving. Unlike the collection of any other museum of modern art in the world, the Modern's is so rich that it has the option of being able to give artists from Gorky through Warhol and Lichtenstein miniretrospectives if the curators so choose.

Over the years its installations have tended to reflect the eye of one curator, most notably Alfred H. Barr Jr., the legendary founding director of the museum. But this time, while the painting and sculpture galleries will ultimately reflect the sensibility of Mr. Elderfield, he has worked closely with his team. When he was named the museum's chief curator for painting and sculpture last year, Mr. Elderfield hired Joachim Pissarro, who had been the curator of European and contemporary art at the Yale University Art Gallery, and Ann Temkin, who had been the curator of contemporary art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. They joined Anne Umland, a senior curator, and Elizabeth Levine, the department's curatorial manager. At first each curator was given an area to work on. Now as the opening nears, the group is collaborating, gallery by gallery, using the model as inspiration.

"I felt strongly that each gallery should have a subject," Mr. Elderfield said. "I want each gallery to have a kind of integrity so that if it were taken out of the museum and plunked into the middle of Central Park, it would be a viable show on its own." He declined to give specifics.

But now rather than giving certain artists their own galleries, he said, they will be more integrated. Mondrian, for instance, always hung by himself. His paintings will now join other abstract artists who will rotate over time.

Another significant change is that the sequence of galleries is being reversed so that contemporary art is the first thing people will see. The space on the second floor, 15,000 square feet of giant, uninterrupted spaces with nearly 21-foot-high ceilings and no columns, can easily accommodate monumental, multiton sculptures.

The combination of the building's modern architecture and the contemporary art within it sends an intentional message: this is the place to come to see art of the new. (It was also a practical decision since oversize sculptures can be installed from the street by crane, which would be impossible with the higher floors.)

Mr. Lowry admitted that the museum was bowing to popular taste. "The interest in contemporary art has been growing since the 1970's," he said. "It has become intense today. An increasingly large number of visitors come specifically to see contemporary art. We hope to engage their curiosity about the past."

And so in much the same way that department stores purposely put their most salable merchandise on the top floor, forcing shoppers to go through the entire building to get it, visitors to the new Modern will have to go to the fifth floor to see the early masterpieces of modern art.

Dealing with the world after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has also changed the way the curators think, Mr. Lowry said. Before 9/11, 40 percent to 50 percent of visitors were foreign. Today about 80 percent are American. "That's a huge demographic shift," Mr. Lowry said, one that will not necessarily alter the nature of installations but that will change the kind of educational materials the museum provides.

"One would be foolish not to assume that we live in a moment that is highly charged and certain images take on a new meaning," Mr. Lowry continued. "Immediately after 9/11, Jasper Johns's "Flag" paintings suddenly acquired a newfound resonance despite the fact that it was not intentional or necessarily desired on the part of the artist. Yet we cannot avoid these references and don't want to."

Then there is the changing nature of art. Over the years the lines have been blurred between painting, drawing, photography, film and video. The permanent galleries will do much more to mix these mediums. There will be paintings by Warhol in the photography galleries and Expressionist prints in the painting's galleries. Photographs will also show up in the second-floor contemporary art galleries.

But perhaps the biggest dilemma is how to tell the story of art of the last 30 years. "It's not a definitive account," Mr. Elderfield said. But, he stressed, by the time visitors reach the last room they will have traveled in time from the 1880's to the present.

"I would hope that people get the message that art from all periods is somehow connected," he said. "That the sequence of art, while drastically different, also relates very powerfully to one another."

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/06/08/arts/cul_MOMA_040609.gif

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

Video (http://moma.org/momabuilds/video.html)

Project Overview (http://moma.org/momabuilds/index.html)

[Kris]

June 17, 2004

The Danes Rule at the Modern Museum

By MICHAEL Z. WISE

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/06/17/fashion/17dane.1.jpg
FAMILIAR Arne Jacobsen's Series 7 chair.

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/06/17/fashion/17dane.2.jpg
HOT AND MODERN A Georg Jensen coffeepot.

THE Swedish home furnishings giant Ikea had an advertisement that declared of America: "It's a big country. Someone's got to furnish it." Now that the big, newly refurbished Museum of Modern Art is nearing completion, the Danes are furnishing it. The Danish government has persuaded the museum to use Danish furnishings for almost all the public areas of its expanded quarters — a triumph of trade policy and product placement.

When last seen, the museum had custom-made wooden benches and a mix of other furnishings, only one of of which will make a return engagement: the Bertoia wire chairs in the sculpture garden designed for Knoll in the 1950's.

"There was no attempt at a kind of uniform all-over effort," said Terence Riley, chief architecture and design curator at the museum.

When the museum reopens, on Nov. 20, the pieces will be unified by source: Denmark. Works by 33 Danish designers, including Arne Jacobsen and Hans Wegner, will be used in the lobby, the cafe and the cafeteria, among other places. The furnishings have a retail value of several million dollars.

The benches by Poul Kjaerholm upholstered in black leather in the galleries and foyers will be Danish, and so will the Georg Jensen coffeepots, the Erik Bagger wine goblets, the Rosendahl candleholders, the Jensen flatware and the Royal Copenhagen china in the restaurant. Some 150 articles are being supplied at a discount by 13 Danish manufacturers and paid for by the Danish government and Danish foundations.

"In some ways I think it's completely excellent, and in some ways I'm just shocked that it's completely Danish," said Zesty Meyers, an owner of R 20th Century, a New York gallery that specializes in vintage design. "That just makes no sense to me, because good design is from all over the world."

The only non-Danish items in the public areas, aside from the Bertoia chairs, will be narrow Knoll benches in some galleries. Four of the Danish objects are already in the permanent collection, including Jacobsen's popular Series 7 chair from 1955, and half of the designers are otherwise represented in the permanent collection.

The agreement with the Danish government was announced last week at a preview of the museum's vastly expanded premises. "The Italians are going to go nuts, and so will the Swedes," said Irene Krarup, the Danish cultural attaché who helped arrange the deal.

"I am somewhat envious," Olle Wastberg, the Swedish consul general in New York, said mildly. "We wish we could have done it. The Danes are to be congratulated."

Gianmarco Pugliese, an Italian Trade Commission marketing official, termed the Danish move "a pretty smart play."

Officials at the museum stress that all the objects underwent curatorial vetting. Although the museum also considered using furnishings by American and Italian makers, the Danes succeeded with their package deal. "It would have been rather churlish to go around the Danes and shop for a better deal," Mr. Riley said, "when the fact is that they had the initiative, and they had the goods."

The Danes also had an advantage in that the approach to the museum was made by their government, not by individuals. "We could have filled the whole museum with American design, but there's no one person you could talk to," Mr. Riley said.

Negotiations got under way in September 2002, when the Danes offered to sponsor furniture and accessories in the public areas. Once the museum decided that 95 percent of the furnishings would be Danish, the Danish government made its offer of a gift. "The curators went on a shopping spree," said Michael Metz Morch, the Danish consul general in New York.

Paola Antonelli, a design curator at the museum, went to Denmark this year to look over more than 300 products, including prototypes. The furnishings she selected were shipped to New York, where other curators tried them out, along with trustees; Ronald S. Lauder, the chairman of the museum; and Glenn D. Lowry, the director. The new furnishings will complement the clean-lined architecture and restrained color palette of Yoshio Taniguchi's new building, Mr. Riley said.

New tableware selected for the museum will go on sale at its design store in August, along with a few furniture pieces. The Danes will be acknowledged on a plaque in the museum.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

September 21, 2003

The Modern's Other Renovation

By ANDREW BLUM

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2003/09/21/arts/blum.184.jpg
Why is the logo on top "digital," "soulless" and downright "hideous," while the logo on bottom shows "character," "warmth" and a "profound respect for the past?"

ON vacation in Greensboro, Vt., in the summer of 1966, Alfred H. Barr, the Museum of Modern Art's first director, had an epiphany. The museum's official abbreviation — long "MOMA" — would, Barr thought, be better served by a lowercase "o": "MoMA." In letters sent from the city, his colleagues took issue with his holiday musings; "it gives me terrible visual hiccoughs," one wrote.

The hiccoughs apparently took decades to subside. It wasn't until the mid-80's that the museum deemed "MoMA" proper enough for use in member communications, and another decade passed before the acronym appeared on banners outside the museum. Today, the museum recognizes that most people identify it by the word "MoMA" — not just the sound of the acronym, but also its look. "That lowercase `o' trapped between those two M's creates a unique word-shape that is translinguistic," Ed Pusz, director of the museum's graphic design department says. "It's accessible to people who don't speak the language."

So it's with a sense of great care that the museum's leaders introduce their latest innovation: a redesigned MoMA logo, a newly scrubbed face by which the revered institution will soon present itself to the world on signs, coffee mugs and subway ads, and throughout the Yoshio Taniguchi-designed expansion and renovation planned to open near the end of 2004. As befits a change of such import, the redesign was undertaken with much attention: the museum hired perhaps the world's foremost typographer, paid him in the low five figures and spent eight months scrutinizing every tiny step in the process.

The outcome? Well, it's subtle.

You would have to look rather closely to see it. Extremely closely. In fact, someone could set the old logo and the new logo side by side and stare for some time before detecting even the slightest distinction. The folks who led the exhaustive makeover process couldn't be more pleased.

As might be expected of some of the most visually aware people in the world, those who have worked on the the Modern's typefaces have a remarkable history of typographic self-scrutiny. In 1964, the museum replaced its geometric letterforms typical of the Bauhaus and German modernism with Franklin Gothic No. 2, one of the grandest and most familiar of American typefaces. Designed in 1902 by Morris Fuller Benton in Jersey City, Franklin is simultaneously muscular, with an imposing weight, and humanist, with letterforms reminiscent of the strokes of the calligrapher's pen rather than a mechanical compass. "Quite simply, it's a face that's modern with roots," Ivan Chermayeff, the designer who made the selection for the museum, recalled recently. "It has some character, and therefore some warmth about it, and some sense of the hand — i.e., the artist. All of which seemed to me to make a lot of sense for the Museum of Modern Art, which is not only looking to the future but also looking to the past."

Mr. Chermayeff's logic held up. Aside from what Mr. Pusz calls a "blip" around the time the museum's expansion opened in 1984, the museum has used Franklin consistently for nearly 40 years. So when the Modern asked the Toronto-based designer Bruce Mau to explore a range of possibilities for the new building's signage — including rounder, more symmetrical typefaces — he felt strongly that Franklin should be left alone. "Everybody gets tired of their own voice," Mr. Mau said from his studio in Toronto, "and so they want to change it. But I was like: `Don't mess with it! It's an extraordinary landmark identity: don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.' "

The museum's director, Glen Lowry, agreed. "We looked at all sorts of options, and said, `You know, we don't need to go there.' Our self-image hasn't shifted so dramatically that our identity needs to be expressed in an utterly new way. We don't need to go from chintz to stripes."

But Mr. Mau noticed that the Franklin the museum was using didn't seem to him like Franklin at all. Somewhere in the process of its evolution from Benton's original metal type to the readily available digital one it had lost some of its spirit, becoming "a hybrid digital soulless version," in Mr. Pusz's words. Metal type traditionally has slight variations between point sizes, to compensate for the properties of ink and differences in proportion. But digital versions of historic typefaces are often created from metal originals of a single point size — as was the case with the commercially available Franklin. It had been digitized from metal type of a small size, distending the proportions at its larger sizes. Once its defects were recognized, they became glaring: the letters were squat and paunchy, sapping all the elegance out of the white space between them. With some of the signage applications in the new building requiring type four feet tall, the small variations became "hideous," Mr. Pusz said.

The museum approached the pre-eminent typographer Matthew Carter about "refreshing" the typeface. On the Mac in his third-floor walk-up apartment in Cambridge, Mass., Mr. Carter has designed many of the letterforms we swallow daily in unthinking gulps — among them typefaces for National Geographic, Sports Illustrated and The Washington Post, as well as Bell Centennial, used in phone books, and Verdana, the Microsoft screen font. Trained originally as a type founder — the person who forges type from hot metal — Mr. Carter pioneered typography's transition to computer-based desktop publishing in the 1980's when he helped found Bitstream, the first digital type foundry. He was one of the first to embrace the idea that type no longer necessarily began with metal forms and ended as an impression on paper; it could be designed, implemented and read without ever escaping the confines of the computer screen.

Refreshing Franklin was, Mr. Carter said, "like asking an architect to design an exact replica of a building." But it was a job he was happy to do: "That opportunity to really study these letterforms and capture them as faithfully as I could was sort of an education to me."

His task was aided by eight trays of metal type of Franklin Gothic No. 2 that had surfaced not long before in the Modern's basement. Not knowing at the time what he would do with them, Mr. Pusz wheeled the trays one by one on a desk chair down the block to his temporary office on the Avenue of the Americas. Mr. Carter scanned printed samples from the trays, and using a software program called Fontographer, began the long process of plotting the curve points for each letter — a task requiring the full extent of his long-learned craft. He also had to invent the variety of characters typical of modern fonts that didn't exist in the metal — currency signs and accents, for example. The resulting typeface — two slight variations, actually, one for signage and one for text — are now being tested on mockups by the Modern's graphic design department to see how they look in different sizes and forms, and, after yet more tweaking, will soon be installed on computers across the museum.

But will anyone notice? "I suspect that if we're really successful the public won't really notice the difference, it will just feel right," Mr. Lowry said. Even if this is a carefully calculated exercise in branding, at least it's true (nearly comically so) to the mission of the museum: less MoMA Inc. than a bunch of aesthetes staring at the shape of their own name until their eyes cross. Perhaps in the sharpened interstices of the "m" or the slightly more pinched ellipse of the "o" there might exist a statement of what the Modern wants to be — you just have to squint to see it. "I think that's really at the heart of the institution's premise, which is a deep and profound respect for the past, and an absolute willingness to engage the present — and a recognition that they're not mutually exclusive," Mr. Lowry said.

No, but sometimes they do look pretty similar.

Andrew Blum is a frequent contributor to Metropolis.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[tmg]

The New York Times Magazine
October 3, 2004
Re-Moderning (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/03/magazine/03MOMA.html)
By ARTHUR LUBOW

(Slide Show (http://www.nytimes.com/packages/khtml/2004/10/03/magazine/20041003_MOMA_AUDIOSS.html))

For more than two years, the Museum of Modern Art has been exiled to a reconditioned staple factory in Queens as a sleek new MOMA, budgeted at a gulp-inducing $858 million, rose conspicuously in Midtown Manhattan. Meanwhile, out of sight in a shabby, windowless conference room in Queens, the curators of the painting and sculpture department have been playing with a scale model of the new galleries, debating how to retell the story of art in the 20th century. Most art museums sort and display their objects as trophies, but MOMA is a church. Its masterpieces, beyond their individual merits, serve a higher purpose: to spread the gospel of modern art. The new selection and arrangement of the permanent collection will be scrutinized as closely as Scripture.

In MOMA's early days things were looser. Alfred H. Barr Jr., who became the founding director in 1929, spoke of the museum as a laboratory. His acquisitions were so wide-ranging that they got him into trouble with the members of his board, who at one time or another found his taste too advanced (a Rothko abstraction), too retrograde (a Hirshfield primitive portrait) or just plain weird (an Oppenheim fur teacup). But Barr had another side: he was a teacher as well as a hunter-gatherer. He famously drew flow charts that mapped the evolution of modern art from the Post-Impressionists -- Cézanne, van Gogh and Gauguin -- on through Picasso and Matisse, and forward into pure abstraction. Barr was constantly revising his charts, adding new names and repositioning others. After he retired, however, his guidelines ossified into a canon. The white galleries of MOMA laid out a story in which modern art history advanced relentlessly, like a train on a track.

Defined for so long as the arbiter and guardian of progressive art, MOMA reopens on Nov. 20 -- its 75th birthday -- at a time when even its own curators no longer believe that art progresses like science. Narratives overlap and intertwine; instead of one big story, there are many competing stories. In the new building, the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi accommodates this insight with a configuration that delivers the museum from the enfilade imposed by its midblock West 53rd Street site. By demolishing the Hotel Dorset on West 54th Street and expanding north, the museum has acquired a physical depth it never had. No longer does one room lead inescapably into the next. Some of the new painting and sculpture galleries will have four doorways, allowing the curators to express their understanding that history can move sideways as well as forward. But complexity too often leads to incoherence. Can MOMA, the most influential voice in the modern-art establishment, still tell the story of 20th-century art in a convincing way?

(Follow link for remainder)

[tmg]

Red Hot MoMA (http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6160129/site/newsweek/)
New York's great modern museum is reborn, thanks to $425 million and an unlikely architect named Taniguchi
By Cathleen McGuigan
Newsweek

Oct. 11 issue - Early one evening last spring, on the edge of the Inland Sea in Japan, architect Yoshio Taniguchi was showing off the construction site of a small museum he'd designed. Taniguchi, 67, is silver-haired and tall (too tall to buy Japanese menswear) and, like his serene modernist buildings, has an air of elegance and calm. "A lot of architects design a lot of details," Taniguchi was saying. "I try to conceal details." His brand of modernism doesn't always express its structure; instead, his buildings tend to have a lightness of being, defying the steel, glass, concrete and stone it took to make them. Their exquisite craftsmanship is legendary, and Japanese contractors are proud to oblige him. "In Japan, Taniguchi walks on clouds," says Brian Aamoth, an American architect who's worked with him there. Later, ordering drinks before dinner, Taniguchi talked about how different building methods are in America. But he never really answered the question of why such a famous architect at home had taken so long to design outside Japan. "You are psychoanalyzing me," he said with a slight smile. Then his cocktail arrived. It was a Manhattan.

When Taniguchi was chosen to design the new, vastly expanded Museum of Modern Art seven years ago, a lot of people in the art world scratched their heads. Out of 10 architects invited to compete for this prize commission (all were under 60—MoMA had ruled out the generation of Frank Gehry), Taniguchi was virtually unknown in America, and his scheme for MoMA's midtown Manhattan site seemed so smooth and corporate—so unfashionably tame—it looked like a long shot next to the provocative concepts of such hotshots as Rem Koolhaas and Herzog & de Meuron. Even Taniguchi didn't think he'd win. Convinced he'd fatally fumbled his key presentation to MoMA's trustees, he headed straight to a neighborhood bar to mourn.

Next month, after nearly four years of construction, MoMA will finally open the doors of his quietly elegant modernist building. The stakes are high—the building alone cost $425 million—and the debate that began with Taniguchi's selection isn't entirely over. It goes to the heart of the museum's identity and signals a shift in contemporary architecture. After years of eye-popping museum design (most famously Gehry's gorgeously curvy Guggenheim Bilbao), Taniguchi's self-effacing building rejects the status of icon, as if to murmur, "Don't mind me—just look at the art." After all, the art is the richest collection of modern masterworks in the world, from Monet's "Water Lilies" to Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" to Andy Warhol's soup cans. Some of MoMA's devout followers believed the museum—the first to create a department of architecture—betrayed its mission by building Taniguchi's scheme rather than something jazzier. But MoMA, 75 years old and hardly a haven for the avant-garde, makes no apology. "It's like having an English suit or an Italian suit," says museum director Glenn Lowry. "Yoshio's building is the English suit—it's not flamboyant but it's perfectly tailored and will be the same in 100 years as it is today."

Taniguchi likes to say his goal is to make the architecture "disappear." And while we don't believe him literally—his ego is fiercely invested in his design principles and his impeccable details—his understated approach at MoMA is to subtly and meticulously create experiences of shifting spaces, light and views as you move through the museum. He started with a homage, restoring the facades of the original 1939 museum by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone and Philip Johnson's 1964 east wing. He then turned his focus to the famous sculpture garden—"the heart of the museum," he says—and framed it with immaculately cool glass-curtain walls and deep, porchlike overhangs. Then, inside the museum, Taniguchi, in his quiet way, went to town: his new entrance cuts a wide public passage through the city block. From there, you cross a spacious ticket lobby and wham!—you're standing in a gorgeous 110-foot-high atrium, flooded with daylight, looking out at that garden. A wide stairway of green slate—or the escalators tucked in beyond—take you up to the art.

The galleries (now covering 125,000 square feet, up from 85,000 in the old building) are classic white boxes, but they vary in size from large to larger, and are arranged so the visitor can wander at will, rather than being force-marched in one direction. On the second floor, one spectacular gallery sprawls 200 feet without columns—a triumph of engineering and a manifestation of MoMA's new commitment to show large-scale contemporary art, like Richard Serra's sculptures. But the best thing about Taniguchi's scheme may be its urbanity. Not only has he neatly knit his complex design into the tight city site but he gives you frequent glimpses of the street and neighboring rooftops from windowed galleries or the atrium's balconies. His museum is meant to mediate between the chaos of New York and the contemplation of art.

Taniguchi has had a lifelong relationship with Western modernism. His father was an early modern architect in Tokyo, and he remembers the impact of "a very colorful culture" brought by American GIs to Japan after the gray war years: "Lucky Strikes, Coca-Cola, Life magazine, Blondie and Superman!" At 21, Taniguchi went to Harvard's Graduate School of Design, the bastion of the Bauhaus, and then worked for Kenzo Tange, who was Japan's foremost modern architect. During those years, he spent time in New York and of course visited the Museum of Modern Art. "I was more interested in the people than the paintings," he recalls. "I liked watching how they looked at the art and how they moved."

If you go to any of Taniguchi's museums in Japan, you begin to appreciate how MoMA's architect-selection committee must have felt when they first saw his work, as they toured Asia and Europe in trustee Ronald Lauder's private jet. The buildings are incredibly seductive—monumental but spare, with surprising shifts in scale—and beautifully crafted. Take the exquisite Gallery of Horyuji Treasures in Tokyo (1999), a structure of delicacy and strength, with a screen of slender steel louvers masking a soaring glass facade. To approach, you walk on water—across a bridge that just clears a tranquil pool. But to get inside, you have to make a little turn and go through a small, low-ceilinged vestibule—meant to suggest the entrance to a traditional tea ceremony, where you humble yourself by ducking through a small opening. Along with his rigorous passion for modernism, and the influence of such masters as Mies van der Rohe, Taniguchi's buildings are inevitably suffused with Japanese culture.

Taniguchi had big budgets during Japan's boom years in the '80s and '90s: the Horyuji gallery cost twice per square foot what MoMA did, and you can see every yen. Many wondered how the perfection of Taniguchi's design details could be replicated in the United States. As it happens, the supervision and much of the detailing of MoMA was put into the hands of a big New York firm, Kohn Pedersen Fox. Last June, Taniguchi toured the MoMA construction site for the first time in months. "In Japan, I design everything, even the door handles," he said. "I'll be honest with you, many details here are different from mine. But the concept I proposed is here." And Taniguchi got his way on key elements. Check out those glass-curtain walls surrounding the garden. The panes are huge (read: expensive) and the mullions are solid steel but very thin (read: superexpensive). The effect is beautifully crisp. "Yoshio won many battles through sheer obstinacy," says Terence Riley, chief curator of architecture. "He would explain so well why something had to be just so—and sometimes he would win by simply a long silence."

Riley argues that Taniguchi's architecture in fact looks radical these days: "It's all straight lines!" Whether radical or retro, what this master of minimalist beauty has created through his gifts and his tenacity is a design lesson in itself. But the ultimate judgment will have to wait: Taniguchi himself told a MoMA curator who'd complimented him that considering the building without the art in it is like admiring the tea cup without the green tea. Next month the museum will have art on the walls and crowds in the galleries—and then the tea ceremony will begin.
© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.

URL: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6160129/site/newsweek/

[Kris]

OUTSIDE THE BOX

by PAUL GOLDBERGER

Yoshio Taniguchi’s elegant expansion of the Modern.

Issue of 2004-11-15
Posted 2004-11-08

The first building that the Museum of Modern Art put up for itself, in 1939, wasn’t sumptuous, like the Met, or extravagantly sculptural, like the Guggenheim, two decades later. It was a crisp, blunt box. Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone’s International Style architecture was defiantly austere—a retort to the idea that museums should resemble grandiose palaces. The white marble building burst out of a row of genteel brownstones on West Fifty-third Street, forcing its way into the Manhattan cityscape. It was a matter of pride that the new building looked nothing like its neighbors.

The museum’s idiosyncratic appearance was always a bit of a pose, however. Though the building’s original design emphasized its difference from the old architecture around it, the ultimate goal of the Modern’s curators was to make all the old stuff go away. In 1951, a new wing by Philip Johnson was built along the museum’s western edge, and in 1964 another, larger Johnson addition appeared on its eastern flank. The Modern grew again in 1984, with a new section by Cesar Pelli, who also designed a companion fifty-two-story apartment tower. And with the opening, this month, of the largest expansion yet, a four-hundred-and-twenty-five-million-dollar addition and renovation by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi, the Modern has pretty much taken over the block. The museum stretches along Fifty-third Street from just west of Fifth Avenue to just short of Sixth, and it reaches north to cover most of Fifty-fourth Street, too. You couldn’t ask for a clearer symbol of how modernism has moved from the cultural fringe to the mainstream. Not only has it been years since the art at the Modern has challenged anyone—its Matisses and Pollocks are beloved by all—but Taniguchi’s strict geometries of stone and glass feel as conventional as a Doric colonnade.

When the Goodwin and Stone building opened, Lewis Mumford wrote that “it possesses, to a degree not dreamed of even by the designers of Rockefeller Center, the luxury of space.” But it wasn’t particularly big; it was barely larger than the neighboring brownstones. Arthur Drexler, who headed the architecture-and-design department for decades, liked to observe that until the 1984 expansion you could fit the entire Museum of Modern Art into the Great Hall of the Met. The Modern didn’t have any enormous galleries, and most of its exhibition spaces were domestic in scale. In fact, the affection that many people felt for the museum was formed by the experience of seeing paintings in fairly small, low-ceilinged white rooms.

The 1984 expansion was an attempt to make the museum bigger without changing its basic qualities, and it didn’t work very well. The galleries got somewhat larger and there were many more of them, this time connected by a prominent set of escalators—yet the place felt unnaturally attenuated, like a stretch limousine. The general feeling about the expansion was summed up by Kirk Varnedoe, the chief curator of painting and sculpture, who said, “We squeezed the last juice you could get out of that model and maybe killed it in the process.” In 1996, when Varnedoe made that remark, it was clear that if the Modern was to grow again it would have to break from small, white rooms and neutral, International Style architecture. Ronald Lauder, the museum’s chairman, reinforced this idea, saying that, as far as the trustees were concerned, the architecture should be “as exciting as possible.”

That isn’t what happened. The Modern talked to dozens of architects, including Rem Koolhaas, Bernard Tschumi, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, and Steven Holl, as well as Taniguchi, and it commissioned casual studies from ten architects and then more detailed plans from three. In 1997, the museum snubbed the radicals and hired Taniguchi, who represents not the cutting edge of architecture but, rather, a carefully wrought, highly refined modernism—a cool and reserved aesthetic that has more in common with the Modern’s original credo than with the expressive direction of recent architecture and museum design.

The decision, I suspect, was based in part on disappointment with the avant-garde architects’ proposals but mostly on the realization that the Modern is fundamentally a conservative institution. The choice of Taniguchi wasn’t so much a failure of nerve as a moment of institutional self-knowledge. This museum wouldn’t have wanted Bilbao if Frank Gehry had done it for nothing. The Modern has supported, collected, and celebrated architectural design more than any other museum in America, but it has never allowed its identity to be defined by any architecture of its own. It is one thing to display Frank Lloyd Wright models inside your galleries; it is quite another to have Rem Koolhaas design your building. The Modern chose Taniguchi, a sixty-seven-year-old architect who was educated at Harvard but has done almost all of his professional work in Japan, because it thought that he could best preserve the museum’s DNA.

That doesn’t explain why Taniguchi’s new Modern is as good as it is. Taniguchi clearly understood a paradox that underscores this project—that his success at keeping the museum the same would come, in part, from his ability to recognize how much had to change. His Modern was going to be nearly twice the size of the previous one, and he knew better than to simply distend the old spaces. With its sleek glass walls and sharp, rectilinear lines, Taniguchi’s huge building superficially resembles the Modern of old, but in many ways it represents a greater change than the oddly shaped buildings proposed by some architects the museum considered, like Herzog and de Meuron, who suggested adding a prismatic glass tower, but would have left the museum’s most celebrated paintings in the old Goodwin and Stone galleries.

Although Taniguchi has created some superb display spaces, his design is most splendid, and subtle, in its urbanism. Until now, the Modern has had an unresolved, almost hesitant relationship with midtown Manhattan. When the benign tension between the 1939 building and the old houses disappeared, nothing replaced it. The museum didn’t feel connected to the city, except in the sculpture garden. When the Modern bought and demolished the Dorset Hotel, on Fifty-fourth Street, along with numerous small brownstones, its site grew not only bigger but also more complex, and Taniguchi saw this as a chance to weave the building into the fabric of the city. He gave it a new entrance, on Fifty-fourth Street, and he provided a public passageway through the block to Fifty-third Street, a huge lobby that anyone can use as a shortcut through a busy section of midtown. The museum now faces both streets, and it has finally become part of the connective tissue of Manhattan. The old Modern occupied the street in sullen isolation; this one dances with its neighbors. Taniguchi even sliced away a bit of his building in the southeast corner of the garden, where it might have blocked a portion of St. Thomas Church, which adjoins the museum to the east. On the inside, he has set skylights on the top floor, right against the base of Pelli’s tower, creating dazzling views right up its side toward the sky.

Taniguchi’s façade of absolute black granite, aluminum panels, and white and gray glass is elegantly restrained. It proves that you can ensconce a building within a kind of classic modern tradition and still imbue it with freshness. And the design works on a large scale—so well that Pelli’s apartment tower, which always seemed too big, now feels like a natural part of a composition. It is balanced by a new, smaller tower at the west end of the site, which houses the museum’s offices, and by two monumental, portico-like gateways at the east and west ends of the sculpture garden. Those porticoes, which resemble gigantic bookends, frame the garden from inside the building, and from the outside they ennoble the transition between the garden and the museum. The sculpture garden has been restored to its original Philip Johnson design (Pelli encroached on it with a greenhouselike structure containing escalators), but the new surroundings that Taniguchi has made for it give the garden a greater intensity.

The interior is a little less reserved than the outside, but not much. The new lobby offers glimpses up to a six-story skylit atrium that cuts through the new gallery floors, Taniguchi’s acknowledgment that a building this big needs vertical as well as horizontal space. The atrium contains precisely positioned openings, projections, balconies, and overlooks; it is a pristine exercise in proportion, scale, and light, not the kind of razzle-dazzle hotel architecture that the word “atrium” calls to mind.

Once inside the museum, visitors follow a sequence that is quite different from that of the old Modern: contemporary art is shown mainly in a set of large, double-height galleries on the second floor, and you move backward in time as you rise through the building and the ceilings get lower. The famous paintings that once hung on the second floor are now on the fifth, in rooms that are only slightly larger than the old ones. At the top of the gallery wing, on the sixth floor, are grand, loftlike galleries for temporary exhibitions.

The main difference is that there is no longer a single sequence of movement, as there famously was at the Modern: one route through obsessively linear galleries that presented the history of art as a straight shot from Cézanne to Picasso to Matisse. The Modern’s singular view of art history came, over time, to take on the stature of myth, and these days politically correct critics call it into question, but the fact is that the gallery scheme was as much a result of physical limitations as of curators’ sensibilities. In the narrow confines of the old Modern, there wasn’t really room to arrange things any other way. Now, though, the building is vast, and its galleries aren’t episodes in a narrative but hyperlinks, offering connections in multiple directions. Terence Riley, the head of the museum’s department of architecture and design, refers to the layout as resembling the child’s game Chutes and Ladders—you can move straight through, or you can slip down a stairway or up an escalator and find yourself in an entirely different moment in the history of art. This approach is more liberating than confusing, because the basic order of the building is always apparent; this museum is not a structure that, like the Met, rambles so much that you get lost in it.

Some of the most pleasant aspects of the design are in the details: a magnificent cantilevered staircase of wood and metal between the fourth and fifth floors is an expert homage to Mies van der Rohe. Taniguchi makes a complex array of balconies, bridges, porticoes, stairs, openings, vistas, and passageways seem serene rather than hyperactive. The building won’t feel busy enough for people weaned on the non-stop stimulation of a lot of today’s architecture, and it won’t feel modest enough for people who insist that God meant the Museum of Modern Art to be small. But I suspect that it will please almost everybody else.

The architect has also restored the façade of the original Goodwin and Stone building, whose Thermolux translucent panels were covered up long ago to provide more hanging space. The restoration is exquisite, and it is both uplifting and saddening. The old building looks better than it has in half a century, both inside and out. But it has been spiffed up like a grande dame who has been dressed to be put on display at her grandchild’s party. When you look at the old building from Fifty-third Street, it seems almost embalmed—a beautiful relic trapped inside a sprawling temple.

www.newyorker.com

[Kris]

INVISIBLE CATHEDRAL

by JOHN UPDIKE

A walk through the new Modern.

Issue of 2004-11-15
Posted 2004-11-08

Times Square has been sanitized and skyscraperized; the subway cars are brightly lit inside and graffiti-free inside and out. New York is going pristine. It is not easy, while gingerly stepping over loose floorboards and extension cords as thick as boa constrictors, to picture the new Museum of Modern Art in every tidy and clean-swept detail, but enough was on view last month to persuade this visitor that the final effect will be immaculate, rectilinear, capacious, and chaste. Whether or not more could be asked of a museum, of a modern museum, I don’t know. The white interiors, chamber upon chamber, some already hung with old friends from moma’s collection and some as bare as a freshly plastered storage closet, gave, a few weeks shy of their unveiling to the public, the impression of a condition delicately balanced between presence and absence. The architect, Yoshio Taniguchi, is Japanese, and a riddling Zen reticence presided over the acres of white wall and white-oak floor, the countless beady little halogen spotlights on their discreetly recessed tracks, the sheets of light-filtering “fritted” glass with their tiny pale strips of baked-in ceramic, and the hushed escalators, whose oily works, not yet functional, were exposed to view and to the ministrations of workmen. Looking into these gears laid bare put me in mind, nostalgically, of the early Giacometti sculpture, “Woman with Her Throat Cut,” that used to lie on a low pedestal on the second floor, and of Arnaldo Pomodoro’s great bronze ball, its polished skin partially flayed, that for a time sat in the old lobby.

Nothing in the new building is obtrusive, nothing is cheap. It feels breathless with unspared expense. It has the enchantment of a bank after hours, of a honeycomb emptied of honey and flooded with a soft glow. My guide, William J. Maloney, the genial project director, quoted the architect as saying to the museum trustees something like this: “Raise a lot of money for me, I’ll give you good architecture. Raise even more money, I’ll make the architecture disappear.” And disappear, in a way, it has. The customary sensations that buildings give us—of secure enclosure, of masses of matter firmly supported—are diluted by a black gap, a mere quarter inch wide, that runs along the bottom and top of every interior wall, and even at the base of weight-bearing pillars, so that everything, subtly, floats. The gaps are useful for heat and air-conditioning, too, but their aesthetic accomplishment is to dematerialize the walls; the visitor moves through spaces demarcated as if by Japanese paper screens. As he moves, artfully arranged glimpses out into the city and across a dizzying, hundred-and-ten-foot-tall atrium orient him and vary his view. Maloney spoke again for the architect: “He didn’t want a box that could be anywhere. He said, ‘I want the people to know they are in New York City.’” North-facing windows frame segments, like Hopper paintings, of the handsome brownstones along West Fifty-fourth Street. On the sixth floor, the top, a wide skylight provides an alarming upward perspective of Cesar Pelli’s fifty-two-story residential tower, erected in 1984 on museum land to one side of the existing museum and now more or less in its center. “Can you imagine,” Maloney asked, “we had to build this with that hanging over us?” He allowed that the tower’s inhabitants had complained of a few jolts and shudders in the three years of construction beneath their feet. But no harm seems to have been done. Engineering miracles are an everyday occurrence in Manhattan.

The museum has expanded a number of times since its opening day, on November 8, 1929, in a rented space on the twelfth floor of the Heckscher Building, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street. In spite of the stock-market crash in progress, the exhibit was so well attended that the building’s other tenants had to fight crowds at the elevators. The seven improvised galleries showed four painters now classified as Post-Impressionist; the Boston Transcript sarcastically put it, “Thursday the newly created Museum of Modern Art opened the doors of its temporary galleries and held a house-warming. The invited guests, besides the usual group of socially elect, were Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, and Van Gogh.” The latter, in fact, attended in force—thirty-five Cézannes, twentysix Gauguins, seventeen Seurats, and twenty-seven van Goghs. In 1932, the thriving museum moved to a five-story town house, owned by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., at 11 West Fifty-third Street, which is still its address. A boxy structure designed as a museum in the International Style by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone replaced it in 1939; this building was added onto in 1951, 1964, and 1984.

West Fifty-third and Fifty-fourth Streets were residential neighborhoods, with back yards and access alleys; therefore museum expansion, except for the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, worked sideways along Fifty-third Street, and the galleries were strung along a rather narrow and inflexible route. In 1996, the Dorset Hotel (fondly remembered for its exiguous lobby and slow elevators) and several adjacent brownstones on Fifty-third and Fifty-fourth came up for sale, and the museum acquired them, giving it a property stretching from St. Thomas Church, on Fifth Avenue, to the Museum of American Folk Art, a few doors up from Sixth Avenue. A thorough redesign was now possible, and it was entrusted to Taniguchi Associates, a Tokyo firm for whom this was the first international commission.

The inkling, in the winter of 1928-1929, shared by three well-to-do women (Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Miss Lizzie P. Bliss, and Mrs. Cornelius J. Sullivan), that New York should have a venue for the display of distinctly modern art had in seventy-five years bloomed into a cultural force able to commandeer swaths of midtown real estate and erect new buildings at a cost approaching a billion dollars. The goal for the capital campaign was set at eight hundred and fifty-eight million dollars; more than seven hundred million has already been secured, with the Board of Trustees contributing a total of more than five hundred million. The project included the acquisition, as a temporary exhibition site and a permanent storage and study facility, of the old, hundred-and-sixty-thousand-square-foot staple factory now labelled MoMA QNS. The renovations and new construction at the midtown museum alone came to four hundred and twenty-five million.

A broad, slightly sloping lobby, paved in green slate, now connects Fifty-third and Fifty-fourth Streets and provides two entrances to the museum. On the eastern side, an eight-story Education and Research Building named for Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman has arisen, and on the western side a thirteen-story tower for offices and galleries. In the middle, the lower seven floors of Pelli’s tall dark tower have been incorporated into the museum. Outside on Fifty-third Street, the façades of the 1939 structure, with its piano-shaped canopy and square windows, and of the 1964 addition by Philip Johnson, whose larger, milled-steel windows have rounded corners, are refurbished and preserved—a satisfying historical touch in an urban environment not given to many such. The buildings, which endow the museum with a midtown presence to rival the Metropolitan’s grand gracing of the upper East Side, defer to their surroundings. Viewed from Fifty-third Street, through the dust and clamor of construction still in progress, the structure behind its medley of façades does not present an arresting silhouette, like Frank Lloyd Wright’s top-shaped Guggenheim or Frank Gehry’s titanium flourish in Bilbao. The new MoMA is not that kind of showpiece. Rather, its six stories of reticent white chambers, tucked under Pelli’s overbearing gray-and-brown glass tower, melt into the cityscape and form, with their treasures, an invisible cathedral.

It used to be said that airports were our new cathedrals, the spires replaced by ascending and descending planes. But they have become workaday and shabby, cluttered with the machinery of heightened security and menaced by airline bankruptcy—bus terminals on the brink, more like refuse-littered marketplaces than like places of worship. The art museums, once haunted by a few experts, students, and idlers, have become the temples of the Ideal, of the Other, of the something else that, if only for a peaceful moment, redeems our daily getting and spending. Here resides something beyond our frantic animal existence. Leonardo spoke scornfully of those men who do nothing in their time on earth but produce excrement. Art, in its traditional forms of painting, drawing, and sculpture, is a human by-product whose collection, in homes, galleries, and museums, lightens the load, as it were, of life. By its glow we bask in the promise of a brighter, more lasting realm reached by a favored few—St. Vermeer, St. Pollock, St. Leonardo. In Paris and Florence, tourists from Japan come by the busful, pose giggling for a photograph in front of the “Mona Lisa” or “The Birth of Venus,” and hurry on their way, blessed.

The old European museums are often converted palaces—the former residences of aristocrats whose duty to the masses was, by a curious clause in the social contract, conspicuous expenditure. So, too, their American imitations, monuments to the Mellons and the Fricks and the Havemeyers; the damask-covered walls and carved marble lintels compete, in a general outpouring of luxury, with the incalculably high-priced works on display. Everywhere, moldings, marble, fluted columns; the frames themselves are princely. But a new kind of opulence, submerged in an exquisite modesty, elaborately defers to the art itself. The seven-year-old Beyeler Museum, on the outskirts of Basel, was designed by Renzo Piano with the septuagenarian Mr. Beyeler at his elbow, urging (according to an informal talk he gave to a touring group of which I was a member) less architecture and more focus on his paintings. They are lit with the latest louvred devices and mounted in a structure of noble simplicity, its cost of more than forty million dollars reflected mostly in the fine workmanship and elegant materials. The long low building slips into the watery, suburban landscape like a sword into a green sheath. The reddish porphyry of the walls is, it gave me pleasure to notice, an echo of the local sandstone used to build the medieval Basel cathedral, now a Protestant church with cloisters and a spectacular High Gothic pulpit.

According to Russell Lynes’s 1973 book, “Good Old Modern: An Intimate Portrait of the Museum of Modern Art,” so-called modern art at the time of the museum’s founding was ill regarded by the public. In 1921, a show of Impressionists and Post-Impressionists at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was greeted, eight years after the notorious Armory Show, with outrage verging on the apoplectic. A four-page printed protest decreed, “This ‘Modernistic’ degenerate cult is simply the Bolshevic philosophy applied to art,” and went on to claim:

The real cult of “Modernism” began with a small group of neurotic Ego-Maniacs in Paris who styled themselves “Satanists”—worshippers of Satan—the God of Ugliness.

The Metropolitan did not venture to show modern art soon again, helping create the vacuum that the female founders of MoMA hoped to fill: the Museum of Modern Art has been called “the Metropolitan’s worst mistake.” In 1929, apropos of the infant moma’s inaugural show, Jerome Klein wrote in the Boston Transcript:

For a number of years the worthy trustees of America’s greatest museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, have been subjected to considerable embarrassment; a great many people have had the bad taste to inquire in the public prints why the competent administrators of the museum have taken no cognizance of the emergence of art in the world of today. . . . The clamor grew and the trustees and their henchmen awoke one day to the horrible discovery that Cézanne and his upstarts had for years been taken up by the best society.

Now even the hoi polloi accept as obvious the beauty and power of the Post-Impressionists; long lines form at their megashows, and the museum stores do a busy trade in prints, posters, shopping bags, and notepads consecrated with their imagery. Fragileappearing, jokey modernism—its little Cubist canvases and even smaller visual witticisms by Klee, its yellowing collages and deadpan Dada stunts—grew and grew and eventually tore down the Dorset.

The new building inevitably incorporates modernism’s problematical nature. When does modern art begin? Some say with Manet, and he did, with his individualized nudes in everyday settings, affront the bourgeoisie; but then so did Courbet, who nonetheless belongs to the old dispensation. The Impressionists were revolutionaries, and we still inhabit their revolution. But MoMA began with the Post-Impressionists, and they make a good starting point, around 1880. Their modernism has a theoretical, abstractifying bent and a determined individuality of style, so that no mature artist can be confused with another, as a Monet might be with a Pissarro. Though the Post-Impressionists still represent the visible world, the reproduction of natural appearances is no longer the heart of the game. We like them because, after centuries of shadowy, complicated illusionism, they used bold colors and simplified shapes. We value them for the resistance they met, and they earn our love with their suffering—van Gogh in the insane asylum, Gauguin adrift in the high seas, Seurat dying young, Cézanne plodding to the easel day after day in eremitic isolation. All of them died before their immortality was widely acknowledged.

And when will modern art end? Robert Hughes, in “The Shock of the New,” muscularly argues that it died around 1970, with Andy Warhol’s anomic embrace of “business art” and the passing of the concept of the avant-garde. By the seventies, a persuasive cultural permissiveness made a cutting edge impossible; suddenly, after Action painting, Pop, Op, color-field, and minimalism, art ran out of nameable movements. There was no more “modern”; there was just “contemporary.” Glenn D. Lowry, moma’s director since 1995, addresses in a thoughtful essay the museum’s history and its situation—doubled attendance, proliferating collections—prior to Taniguchi’s twenty-first-century expansion:

A number of options were available, from ceasing to collect contemporary art altogether—never a serious possibility—to establishing a separate museum for contemporary art, which, however, in establishing a division between the earliest and the most recent works in the collection, would have created more problems than it solved.

The new museum’s layout is open-ended, with a double-height, column-free space set aside on the reinforced second floor for contemporary art—its sheets of warped steel, its mountains of bricks or tin cans or lavender Teddy bears, its mazy installations and messy assemblages. Whatever contemporary art is not (pleasurable, say, or exquisite), it is big, and Taniguchi has created a giant room for it, stealing height from the floor above and providing a sliding door whereby oversized sculpture can be gantried in from the street. What is left of the third floor contains galleries for photographs, drawings, and architecture and design. The next floor up, the fourth, is intended for work, such as the large canvases of the Abstract Expressionists, from the postwar period to 1970, and the fifth, accessible via a grand staircase, will shelter the relatively handy works of classic modernism, from the end of the nineteenth century. The sixth floor is reserved for special exhibitions, to which escalators and elevators are expected to carry the multitudes.

The first floor will hold, besides the entry lobby and the desks for admission and membership, the commercial enterprises increasingly conspicuous among a museum’s attractions, the bookstore/shop and the restaurant—restaurants, in this case, fancy in proportion to their nearness to the Sculpture Garden. Farther from it is the bar and the bar food, in a space fittingly named for the museum’s first director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Then there is, with a close view of the garden and, in season, some outdoor tables, the restaurant de résistance, bluntly called the Modern and generalled by a name chef, Gabriel Kreuther, sprung from the Ritz-Carlton on Central Park South. All eating places (and there are more, on the second and fifth floors) will be operated by Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group. The first-floor establishments will be entered by a kind of speakeasy entrance from noon until as late as eleven-thirty; one looks forward to a heist movie in which Robert De Niro and George Clooney sneak upstairs from their 11 p.m. espresso and brandy to appropriate some Picassos and Brancusis. And, oh yes—the Sculpture Garden, wider and longer, has been born again with new young trees to replace the birches and beeches that had been getting too shaggy anyway.

The cathedral stands ready for the faithful. Here they come: the slow-footed tourists, foreign and domestic; the suburban adventuresses in for lunch; the Brearley seniors with their spiral-bound sketchbooks and their flaxen tresses; the semi-unshaven East Village youth, two years out of Podunk, looking for an art fix even if it means sitting through Andy Warhol’s static epic “Empire.” A few pilgrims, perhaps, will turn back from the counter when they are told that the admission fee is twenty dollars and a mere twelve and sixteen, respectively, for students and sixty-five-and-overs who have the I.D.s to prove it. But a balcony seat at a failing Broadway musical costs three times that, and MoMA floor space has been increased by almost half again, from eighty-five thousand square feet to a hundred and twenty-five thousand.

Is more truly more? MoMA, which I first visited in the late nineteen-forties, was a relatively intimate collection of human-scale works in non-palatial rooms. Picasso’s “Guernica,” on loan to keep it away from Franco, and Rousseau’s “Sleeping Gypsy” were the biggest canvases in sight; Baziotes, Dubuffet, and Peter Blume were the latest things on the walls. You could hustle through it in an hour or two, on a one-way route. With the expansion of 1964, which added the great Picasso-Matisse room, some choices for ambulation were offered; but it was still, on the second floor, a single experience. Now four floors, plus soundproof galleries for video and media, beckon from all sides. One of the charms of a museum for modern art was that there wasn’t too much of it, just as a lifetime of history wasn’t too much. After seventy-five years, a life is a stretch and the cathedral may have too many chapels. “Nous verrons,” as Cézanne might remark, squinting toward Mont Sainte-Victoire. We shall see.

www.newyorker.com

[Kris]

November 11, 2004

NATURE

A Rooftop Garden With Synthetic Green

By ANNE RAVER

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Ken Smith's designs for the Museum of Modern Art's garden, with artificial boxwoods, plastic rocks and rubber mulch. It will open in late February, but strictly for viewing.

WHEN the Museum of Modern Art commissioned Ken Smith to design two roof gardens on the sixth floor of the expanded museum designed by Yoshio Taniguchi, the challenge was in the restrictions: No irrigation. No live plants. No maintenance. No heavy planters.

"The roof is over the new gallery space, so they don't want any leaks," Mr. Smith, a Modernist landscape architect, said last week as he hoisted a black plastic boulder in his Chambers Street studio.

It is one of 185 plastic rocks Mr. Smith will use in the roof gardens, along with 560 artificial boxwoods, 300 pounds of clear crushed glass and 4 tons of recycled rubber mulch.

Mr. Smith is known for his innovative designs for difficult spaces. He was a member of Think, a team that competed for the World Trade Center commission with a plan that included sky gardens at the top of two soaring glass towers.

Four years ago, he turned a scrap of treeless asphalt in the middle of a busy Harlem intersection into Malcolm X Plaza, where catalpa trees now shade colorful tiles and Art Deco benches. In 2002, he restored the elegant 1950's landscape at Lever House, the Gordon Bunshaft skyscraper on Park Avenue.

"He's willing to take on a project that maybe because of its restrictions would be a turnoff to others," said Peter Reed, a curator at the museum's department of architecture and design. (Mr. Reed declined to disclose the budget for the roof gardens.)

Though the new, expanded Modern opens on Nov. 20, the roof garden will not be finished for another three months. It is scheduled for completion by Feb. 22, in time for the opening of "Groundswell: Constructing the Contemporary Landscape." With Mr. Reed the curator, the exhibition showcases the works of cutting-edge designers, including Kathryn Gustafson, Martha Schwartz, George Hargreaves and Peter Latz.

But visitors to the museum will not be able to walk through the new roof garden, on top of the sixth floor of the galleries. The space is inaccessible to the public. It is strictly for viewing from the windows and roofs of buildings above it.

"People will see this roof," Mr. Reed said, looking down on the still bare space from the 17-story office tower that Mr. Taniguchi designed. "It's a public gesture in that sense." So museum staff will enjoy it, daily. And so will people in surrounding skyscrapers, particularly the residents of the 52-story Museum of Modern Art Tower built over the original museum.

The space is huge for a roof garden: 7,500 square feet on the 53rd Street side and 9,250 square feet on 54th Street. Each side has one large rectangular skylight, to admit light into the galleries below.

Mr. Smith's first design called for fields of plastic daisies, which he found on the Internet for about $4 apiece. The 10-inch pinwheel daisies come in four colors: purple, red, green and brown.

"The daisies would spin and also pivot with the wind," Mr. Smith said. He built a model, attaching the plastic stems to a grid of green PVC pipe.

"It was a color field," said Mr. Smith, who teaches at the Harvard Design School. "Or, Marcel Duchamp's found objects meet the minimalist landscape."

Curators liked the scheme's "pop, whimsical nature," Mr. Reed said. "But it didn't go over with some of our most immediate neighbors, whose apartments look right down on the roof."

So Mr. Smith went back to the drawing board. "My strategy this time was to do something that would fly under the radar," he said. "Something that was subversive, but could blend in." What he came up with is a riff on the art of camouflage, from those swirls of brown and green on the jackets of hunters and soldiers, designed to blend in with the forest and field, to the artificial wilderness of rocks and woods that Frederick Law Olmsted created for Central Park, in the middle of a grid of city streets.

He built a mock-up on the roof in the fall of 2003 using the actual materials — artificial boxwoods, white gravel and a gray plastic boulder — so that museum officials and residents could get a sense of the garden elements from the 25th floor of the museum tower. "You can't tell, at that distance, if those boxwoods and rocks are real or not," Mr. Smith said.

Mr. Smith's camouflage garden is an ironic comment on the art of landscape architecture itself.

"We practice camouflage every day," he said. "We hide activities, electric transformers, architectural mistakes. No one ever really talks about that part of it."

These boxwoods, which are resistant to the damage of the sun's rays, have a life of about seven years. So either they can be replaced, or some entirely new installation can take the garden's place.

"I actually like thinking of landscapes as temporary," Mr. Smith said. And this roof space affords the opportunity for different artists to experiment with yet another space.

"Artists don't stop at boundaries," Mr. Reed said. "We're always looking for unconventional locales. One artist wanted to put a project in the elevator."

Those daisies, by the way, weren't wasted. Exactly 400 of them are blooming in Mr. Smith's "Daisy Border," one of 15 avant-garde installations at the Cornerstone Festival of Gardens just south of Sonoma, Calif.

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Ken Smith balances on a fake rock atop the new Museum of Modern Art.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

November 12, 2004

A Grand Renovation at the Museum of Modern Art Spurs a Makeover Next Door, Too

By JAMES BARRON

It is the Brancusi of loading docks, or maybe the Henry Moore, but certainly not the Calder. It has carefully thought-out lines, but it lacks the kinetic potential of, say, Calder's famous "Lobster Trap and Fish Tail."

It is the loading dock at Museum Tower, the apartment building next door to the Museum of Modern Art (home of the "Lobster Trap" mobile). And the loading dock symbolizes - to the extent that a loading dock can symbolize anything - the relatively modest makeover that Museum Tower received while the Modern underwent a major makeover.

Consider how the museum, scheduled to reopen next week, approached the project. It closed down, moving the art and the crowds that come to look at it to a former stapler factory in Queens for a couple of years. Museum Tower, a tall and coolly dark box that the architect Cesar Pelli designed to contrast with the Modern's original white-marble building next door, stayed put, becoming a construction zone in its own right as the Modern's contractors removed heating and cooling equipment that had served the museum but was inside the apartment building (and was no longer needed).

The Modern also paid to move the loading dock, whose original location would have made the museum's $858 million expansion and renovation all but impossible.

Residents of the tower's 242 multimillion-dollar apartments learned to tolerate grinding noises as walls and floors were drilled through. They learned not to wash their windows, because there was too much dust and dirt. They learned to thread their way beneath the scaffolding over their front entrance, on West 53rd Street between Fifth Avenue and the Avenue of the Americas.

"Of course there was dislocation and it was sometimes unpleasant," said Toni Ausnit, the president of Museum Tower's board of managers, as the building calls its elected board of residents. But the museum's renovation has also presented the building with an "extraordinary opportunity," she said.

"I remember saying at an annual meeting that most buildings are new once, and that's it," Ms. Ausnit said. "They age, and other buildings capture people's imagination. Because of the museum's expansion, we were getting a chance to be reinvented, to be made anew, so it was much easier to take the long view."

The long view is that the Museum Tower will have a gym and a conference room, along with a residents-only area overlooking the museum's redesigned garden. The residents will be card-carrying members of the museum for five years. And, of course, there is the new loading dock, which opens onto West 54th Street.

The museum paid for the renovations, which involved no out-of-pocket expenses for Museum Tower. The details were worked out in discussions with museum officials, architects and engineers, some representing the museum, some Museum Tower.

"We started out with the point of view that we were good neighbors and wanted to continue to be," said a Museum Tower board member, Theodore N. Voss, a marketing consultant and former executive with Polaroid and Atari. "We couldn't get angry. We just had to keep communicating."

Some of the communicating was with Yoshio Taniguchi, the architect the Modern hired to unify the museum's original 1939 building and the 1964 renovation and expansion by Philip Johnson.

Ms. Ausnit said there were moments when Mr. Taniguchi joked about all the small changes he had been asked to make. "Each time he accommodated someone," she recalled, "he said he'd put a sign: 'This should have been slightly to the left' or 'That should have been slightly higher.' "

But Museum Tower accommodated the museum regarding the loading dock, which ended up moving more than slightly to the right of where it used to be. It is now at the opposite corner of the building, about 100 yards from its original location. Moving it mattered to the museum because the old loading dock would have been in the way of the museum's garden, which Mr. Taniguchi reoriented.

Moving the loading dock meant installing a second service elevator in Museum Tower, which runs between the loading dock and the basement, and carving a corridor out of space that originally belonged to the museum, not Museum Tower. That corridor leads to the original freight elevator, which did not originally not run to the basement. (It does now, after some excavation.)

Museum Tower also gave the museum space in a first-floor powder room. "We couldn't find a way to support the new escalator" in the museum without spilling over into Museum Tower, said William J. Maloney, the museum's project director. If Museum Tower had not gone along with the idea of shrinking the powder room, "we would have had to make the galleries smaller," he said.

While Mr. Maloney said the construction at the museum would be finished in time for its scheduled reopening, the construction at Museum Tower is not done. The gym has yet to be built. The same goes for the building's new garden overlooking the museum's redesigned garden.

And there are those who say the end of the construction will pose new challenges.

"We have been spoiled because we've never had to walk our dog in the rain or the snow," said Linda Kenney, who moved in four years ago with her husband, Dr. Michael M. Baden, the former chief medical examiner of New York City, and was happy to find that the construction scaffolding shielded them from bad weather. "We're chagrined now that the canopy for the construction is down and there's a beautiful clean sidewalk about to take its place."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

November 15, 2004

ARCHITECTURE REVIEW

Art Fuses With Urbanity in a Redesign of the Modern

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

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Barnett Newman's "Broken Obelisk" and Monet's "Water Lilies" in the second-floor atrium.

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A glimpse of St. Thomas Episcopal Church from the Sculpture Garden, framed by the top of the eastern canopy and the reclad facade of Philip Johnson's 1964 addition.

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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.

Audio Slide Show (http://www.nytimes.com/packages/khtml/2004/11/15/arts/20041114_MOMA_AUDIOSS.html)

The 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.

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

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

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://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/11/15/arts/041115_cul_MOMAch.jpg

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

THE UNSEEN MOMA

For architect Taniguchi, subtlety reigns in the museum's redesign

BY JUSTIN DAVIDSON
STAFF WRITER

November 14, 2004

For all its vastness, the new Museum of Modern Art is barely perceptible from 53rd Street, where a fresh segment of blank gray wall has joined a parade of facades from the museum's various expansions.

"I have an ego, but not so much," says Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi, standing on the chilly sidewalk in front of the museum, itemizing the layers of history. First came the pearl-white 1939 building by Goodwin and Stone, then in 1960 a small black wing by Philip Johnson, then Cesar Pelli's looming Museum Tower in 1984 and now Taniguchi's sleek connective tissue.

"I like to make myself very humble on the street," he says. "I tried to be very simple, and put all of my energy into creating the interior space. When you go inside, you have to get excited gradually until your encounter with the works of art. It's like a piece of music: If in the beginning you make it too strong, you get overwhelmed; it has to increase until you approach the finale."

Taniguchi, who has been commuting from Tokyo since he won the competition in 1997 to design the new MoMA, slips into a service entrance and moves through the spaces he designed, looking slightly astonished on his first tour of the completed museum. He winces from time to time, pointing out the evidence of battles he has lost - a wall where a window should be, a glass wall he would prefer to have closed off - and the places where, even with a $425-million budget, corners had to be cut.

"I don't like that door; it should be invisible," he mutters. "I should have separate fund-raising just for doors."

Taniguchi consoles himself: "If the concept is strong enough, the details don't matter." But in a building as spare and refined as this one, details matter enormously, and most of them are near-perfect enough to attract almost no attention.

Terence Riley, the museum's chief curator of architecture and design, has a well-plowed story about Taniguchi's self-effacement: "After he won the competition, Yoshio says to me, 'If you raise a lot of money, I'll give you very good architecture. If you raise really a lot of money, I'll make the architecture go away.'"

'Architecture hiding itself'

It sounds like a gnomic paradox, but the concept of invisible architecture translates into a constellation of expensive decisions. Riley pointed to a black granite wall whose panels are so large and meticulously aligned that the joints all but vanish, creating the effect of a seamless curtain. "When the light hits it a certain way, it looks like velvet," Riley says. "This is architecture that's all about hiding itself."

To Taniguchi, who until the MoMA commission had worked exclusively in Japan, the goal is not neutrality or blandness, but serene inconspicuousness. "Architecture is a container for people or for works of art," he says. "It's a frame, and in modern art you don't want to emphasize the frame. Here it doesn't have any particular form, only straight lines. I tried to create not a shape, but an environment."

Only once does he allow himself a glimmer of self-congratulation - and even then, it's for a space he has preserved, not one he designed. "I really did a good thing here," he says, standing in the original lobby, which now serves as a staff and restaurant entrance.

His pride lies in having fought to see it restored to its prewar glory. Daylight from 53rd Street washes through translucent panels of Thermolux. A sinuous counter echoes the wave of the silver canopy outside. "I might have lost this struggle, but it was very important to me," he says softly. "I had to be very loud."

A modern throwback

Taniguchi's fixation on archaeological preservation, like his fondness for modernist minimalism, seemed like a throwback in 1998. Then, many critics thought MoMA would follow the lead of the Guggenheim and turn to a flamboyant celebrity architect such as Frank Gehry, who had just famously bestowed on the Spanish city of Bilbao a museum as urban sculpture.

In choosing Taniguchi, who was almost completely unknown in the United States, the Modern hoped to build itself a classic and convince the public that the whole concept of the cutting edge in architecture had become passe.

"The expressionistic architecture of the so-called avant-garde, like Frank Gehry or Rem Koolhaas, has now become the norm: It's what everybody wants," scoffs MoMA's director, Glenn Lowry. "They've been co-opted by the establishment, and therefore I think in many ways the kind of architecture that Yoshio practices is far more daring. When there's a rush to do things in one way, there's always going to be a countermovement, and that countermovement is as radical as the so-called avant-garde."

Taniguchi seems amused by the controversy. "Am I conservative or radical?" he asks. To claim to be either would be to shift attention from the art to the architecture, from the content to the wrapper, from the work to the man. So the question just hangs there, to be answered or made irrelevant when the public arrives next Saturday. Nothing would give Taniguchi more satisfaction than a crowd of visitors gazing at the paintings and ignoring the walls.

When the Museum of Modern Art reopens next weekend, its first temporary exhibit will be "Yoshio Taniguchi: Nine Museums," a survey of the architect's austere but meticulously detailed buildings, all of them in Japan. For hours and information, call 212-708-9400, or go to www.moma.org .

Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.

[TonyO]

NOVEMBER 22, 2004
BusinessWeek Online

NEWS: ANALYSIS & COMMENTARY

Modern Isn't Even The Word For It
New York's refurbished MOMA boasts futuristic technology to guide and inform visitors


Think of it as the modernization of the Modern. Four years ago, New York's Museum of Modern Art embarked on an $858 million rebuilding project. The new facility, which opens to the public on Nov. 20, has been widely lauded for its soaring atrium, wide-open galleries, and huge windows opening onto mid-Manhattan.

But MOMA's transformation goes well beyond steel and glass: Management grabbed the chance to install state-of-the-art technology, too. The upgrades -- developed with help from IBM -- include a wireless network, multimedia personal digital assistants that guide visitors through the exhibits, and a 35-foot flat-panel display in the lobby where pulsating photos of art will be interspersed with instant updates on shows or lectures. The museum also is considering using wireless-tracking technology to monitor its 150,000 works of art, from three-ton sculptures to the tiniest drawings. When you "start with a clean slate," says MOMA Chief Operations Officer James Gara, "you're not anchored to the past. And that includes how you deal with technology."

MOMA's moves put it in the vanguard among tech-savvy museums at a time when many are under intense pressure to improve operating efficiency and draw more visitors. If these experiments pan out, wireless multimedia guides and other elements of MOMA's strategy could pop up at museums worldwide.

MOMA has big plans for its PDAs, which are basic Toshiba Corp. (TOSBF ) Pocket PCs. The first offering will be an architectural tour of the museum, featuring historic film clips and video interviews with architects and curators. "We want to enhance the art, not supplant it," says Steve Peltzman, MOMA's chief information officer. As the system gets up and running, the staff hopes to tap into the wireless network so visitors can access information on the fly from the museum's digital archives. Ultimately, art watchers should be able to log onto MOMA's Web site and customize their tours, which will be downloaded to a handheld when they arrive.

There's plenty of new technology coming behind the scenes as well. Next year, MOMA will experiment with the radio-frequency-identification technology used by the likes of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT ) to track inventory. The museum hopes RFID can be adapted to track works of art.

Don't expect MOMA's tech relaunch to be glitch-free. During a recent test, CIO Peltzman had to make minor adjustments to the ticketing system. But once the kinks are worked out, this stuff could be nearly as artful as the art itself.


By Steve Hamm in New York

[TonyO]

NOVEMBER 22, 2004
BusinessWeek Online

NEWS: ANALYSIS & COMMENTARY

Online Extra: IBM's Tour de Force For MOMA
Big Blue's John Tolva and Stan Litow explain the thinking behind the renovated museum's new "cinematic" guide technology


IBM Corp. (IBM ) helped the Museum of Modern Art in New York revamp its technology as part of the big rebuilding project. John Tolva, a program manager at IBM, was the executive producer of the multimedia guide project. Stan Litow, vice-president for corporate community relations at IBM, oversaw both the MOMA guide and a precursor project for the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. They talked with BusinessWeek Senior Writer Steve Hamm about how the MOMA guide took shape. Here are edited excerpts of the conversation:

Q: Audio guides have become standard fixtures of many museums. When did museums start thinking about multimedia guides?
Tolva: It's a new thing. A couple of museums are doing pilots with the guides. One thing we've focused on is a story-building application that sits back on the servers and allows curators to quickly build tours themselves. They don't have to go to an outside producer to get the program done.

Litow: This guide is heavily video-based. The first program is a history of the building, with a lot of archival video and audio. You have multimedia slide shows with voiceover. You see pieces of the building that have become art in their own right.

Q: What's your vision of the potential for multimedia guides?
Litow: By connecting the content management of the museum with the digital guide, you can deal with the entire museum on the guides -- not just special shows or a few pieces. And visitors can connect their visit to the museum to the museum's Web site when they get back home. It also makes the museum more of a global resource. You can post the programs made for the guide on the Web site for anybody to see.

Q: What lessons did you learn with the Egyptian Museum guides that you're applying to MOMA's guide?
Tolva: We started thinking about storytelling. The Tomb of Tutankhamen is a tour where as visitors move from object to object, they move about the concepts of statesmanship in ancient Egypt. That helps them understand why the pyramids were built. The guides let you drill down into the story. There are menus that you can use to see more and go deeper. This is true of the MOMA guide, too.

The MOMA guide is cinematic rather than encyclopedic, like Egypt. MOMA wanted really good design. Everything about the museum from the wireless networks to the flat-panel displays in the walls. It has always been about making the technology disappear in the service of aesthetics.

Q: You chose the Pocket PC to display the guide. Why?
Tolva: PocketPC has the most robust support for Flash, the language we used to create the story. Also, the museum wanted a large, bright color screen, and Toshiba Pocket PC has the largest screen.

In the future, there will be new devices that museums will look at. Eventually, people might be able to run the programs on their own cell phones. We designed it to be flexible enough to run on different devices.

Q: What was the most challenging technical hurdle you faced?
Tolva: Getting full-motion video on these little devices is nontrivial. These aren't laptop computers. We optimized the video. We increased compression of the data to make it small enough so we didn't overtax the processor.

Also, we built a generic framework so they don't have to call IBM up every time they want a new program. It allows whole new media types to be added -- maybe 3-D objects that people will want to rotate so they can look at them from different angles. You might want to add instant messaging, so people in a tour group can exchange thoughts about the art without speaking out loud.

We didn't want to foreclose options. Now, it's slide shows, audio, and video. But you can imagine a day when they'll do something more interactive.

[Kris]

November 16, 2004

At Modern, Architect Is Content (Mostly)

By ROBIN POGREBIN

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/11/16/arts/tani.jpg
Yoshio Taniguchi says of the expansion: "It's nearly perfect."

Yoshio Taniguchi is a pessimist by nature.

Each time Mr. Taniguchi, the architect, visits one of his buildings, he sees every compromise he had to make, every flaw he would like to fix. As he strolled recently through the newly expanded Museum of Modern Art, his first project outside Japan, it was no different.

Visiting the fifth-floor painting and sculpture galleries, Mr. Taniguchi stopped and ran his fingers over a seam in one of the metal panels that separate one room from the next, mourning the undisturbed surface he said he would have preferred there.

He lamented having had to cut back on the number of skylights because of budget considerations. He worried that a wall of windows near the second-floor bookstore reading room would pull the focus away from the building's atrium. He questioned the placement of Matisse's "Dance" over a staircase connecting the fourth and fifth floors, and the elevation of Claes Oldenburg's "Geometric Mouse" in the sculpture garden.

But as Mr. Taniguchi, 67, stood there surveying his soaring yet understated temple of granite, marble, oak, aluminum and glass, he admitted to a rare moment of gratification. "I think I'm quite satisfied," he said.

"It's nearly perfect," he added. "I'm not supposed to say that because I'm Japanese. I'm supposed to sound humble."

Despite a construction budget of $425 million, compromises were inevitable, Mr. Taniguchi said. Then there were the structural challenges: to link the old building to his addition, for example, the Modern had cut through an existing residential tower. But in the end, he said, his most important ideas endured.

These include the atrium, around which all the galleries except photography are organized; a traverse that allows people to cross through the museum between West 53rd and 54th Streets; a new facade on 54th Street; the preservation of the original design on 53d Street; and the juxtaposition of the museum's education and gallery space, connected by an expanded sculpture garden.

"The big things are here," said Terence Riley, chief curator in the Modern's department of architecture and design.

Like the Modern addition, Mr. Taniguchi's projects in Japan, which include museums, libraries and schools, are deceptively simple in their vocabulary: there is not a Bilbao or a Getty among them.

So when the Modern announced seven years ago that it had chosen Mr. Taniguchi to design its expansion, many architects were surprised. He was largely unknown in the United States. And the architect had generally avoided competitions. "I can't generate something if I'm not 100 percent sure it will be built," Mr. Taniguchi said, although in this case he took the risk.

To be sure, there are those who would have liked the Modern to come up with something more overtly splashy or iconoclastic. But Glenn D. Lowry, the museum's director, said Mr. Taniguchi gave the Modern just what it needed. "It's a very ethereal building, and that's what we were after," he said.

"The building reinforces the experience of looking at art," Mr. Lowry said. "For all of the views of the city, for all the soaring spaces, for all of the bridges that cut dramatically across - at the end of the day, he enables you to enjoy looking at art."

Mr. Taniguchi said he deliberately took a light touch because a museum should not upstage what is in it. "Without art, museum architecture should look unfinished," he said. "If it looks finished, it's a very bad museum.

"In some museums, the architecture starts competing with the works of art," he continued. "You have to control your ego when you design museums. By controlling your ego you can do something new."

This is not to say that he did not design with a strong hand. Every element of the new Modern has an explicit and thoroughly researched reason behind it. There are no escalators before you ascend to the second floor; Mr. Taniguchi wanted traffic to flow through the atrium, toward the garden and up the stairs.

In the atrium, there is a line of slender columns on one side and an expansive wall on the other. "I wanted to have an asymmetrical arrangement," he said, "and at the same time, to emphasize centrality."

To keep the columns slim, Mr. Taniguchi put more of the weight-bearing load on structures inside the wall. The columns gently suggest a circulation pattern, guiding visitors. "My architecture is very subtle," he said. "Maybe nobody will notice. But those fundamental elements are very important for me."

Rather than trying to dictate where paintings and sculpture might go in each room, the architect said, he sought to make suggestions through his forms and spaces. "I don't choose the paintings," he said. "But by means of architecture, I give a sense of what would be appropriate."

The dark granite information desk, for example, cried out for a strong painting above it, he said. The museum obliged with Ellsworth Kelly's colorful "Spectrum IV." The first staircase has a sense of expectancy and drama; that is the spot for an actual-size helicopter designed by Arthur Young.

"This is our 'Winged Victory,' " Mr. Riley said of the helicopter, referring to the marble statue displayed at the top of a sweeping staircase in the Louvre.

If the museum seems to levitate, Mr. Riley said, it is because of the buoyancy of its structure: the exterior walls are slight, and the interior walls float just above the floor. The materials are soft, the colors natural. The granite wall next to the main staircase, for example, looks as though it could be fabric. "I lot of times I look at it," Mr. Riley said, "and see velvet."

Although Mr. Taniguchi created his plans on a computer, he worked mostly with models so that he could see where the light would fall and what it would feel like inside the museum. "His building is really about experience, so you have to make a model so you can experience it," Mr. Riley said.

Mr. Taniguchi said this experiential focus can make his buildings difficult to photograph, although the museum has just published "Nine Museums," a photographic study of some of his work, corresponding to an exhibition of some of the architect's projects. Mr. Taniguchi's previous work includes the Shiseido Museum of Art, the Tokyo Sea Life Park and the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art as well as libraries, schools, a teahouse and a garden.

Mr. Riley, who wrote the book's text, described Mr. Taniguchi's work as "almost cinematic."

"A lot of architecture has a visual focal point," he said. "Look at Yoshi's architecture - pick a line, and it's as if it never ends."

The son of an architect, Yoshiro Taniguchi, a prominent modernist in postwar Japan, Mr. Taniguchi grew up in Tokyo. He earned his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering at Keio University and his master's in architecture at Harvard. Before establishing his own practice, he worked from 1964 to 1972 in the studio of Kenzo Tange, an architect who played a major design role in the reconstruction of Hiroshima and other ravaged cities.

Mr. Taniguchi never moved to New York to work on the Modern; he kept his office in Japan, where he lives with his wife, Kumi. But he visited the city 40 times in the last eight years, staying for two weeks at a stretch. The executive architect on the project was the firm Kohn Pederson Fox. "I like to be involved personally," he said, so he purposely does not do too many projects at the same time.

"Eight years is a long time," he added. When he began, he said, "my hair was still black."

There were many constituencies to satisfy: five curatorial departments, a powerful director, influential board members. But Mr. Taniguchi said he felt as if he were designing a home, not a museum - with 500 family members, interjected Mr. Riley, who accompanied the architect as he walked through the Modern with a reporter.

Now, in a sense, the museum is moving on without him, Mr. Taniguchi said, and he will miss the project. "We don't have any children," he said of his marriage. "So this is like my daughter."

"They made me an honorary trustee," he added, "so I can watch how my daughter will grow."

And maybe there will be more tinkering, he said, although he was not specific. "It's better to be unsatisfied," he said. "Because you can always add something more."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[NYatKNIGHT]

Now I really can't wait to see this.

[Kris]

'We are talking superlatives here'

From the majesty of the permanent collection to the incoherent displays of new work, Adrian Searle gives his verdict on Moma's $425m revamp

Adrian Searle

Monday November 15, 2004

The Guardian

New York's Museum of Modern Art is the mother of modern art museums. It's enormous and, like Walmart, it's got the lot. What began life, a little more than 75 years ago, on a single floor of a building on the corner of 5th Avenue and 57th Street, is now a complex a full city block wide, gleaming from a $425m expansion and reconstruction, a much-publicised refit whose overall cost is more than double that figure.

With its sheer facades of dark glass and absolute black Zimbabwean granite, its enlarged sculpture garden and a good 12,500 sq ft lobby, its six expanded floors arranged about a dizzying sky-lit atrium, we are talking superlatives. All that fund-raising, all that architecture, all that art: more than 100,000 things, from paintings and sculptures and drawings and prints and photographs and film, to the great tranches of the unclassifiable, a hoard that has expanded by about 80% in just the past 25 years.

Statistics are one thing. A museum is an experience. So, too, lest we forget, are the individual things it contains, which, one by one, wall by wall and room by room, provide us with solace and entertainment, with bafflement, curiosity, nightmares. History lessons and confrontations, retail opportunities and lunch - the museum nowadays has to offer all this, and accommodate scholarship and tourism, a mass audience that has doubled in less than a decade. Moma expects something like 1.8 million visitors a year. You can count on that as a conservative estimate.

For all the seriousness and care that has gone into Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi's new museum, which has been built around the existing architecture, and the installation of the much-expanded galleries, it is not difficult to imagine what a visit to Moma will be like once it has reopened on Saturday. What chance the careful sightlines, the space for thought, the precise alignments and groupings of works?

Above the lobby, with its curtain window views of the sculpture garden, is what director Glenn Lowry identifies as the museum's piano nobile, above which rises that soaring atrium, with its picture-window views of crisscrossing staircases and glimpses of ceilings of the upper floors. These are windows to look down from rather than up at. Atria are all very well, but they don't do much for the art that is placed in or under them. Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk (1963-9) cowers in the space. I have never liked this welded steel sculpture, with its slightly tricksy acrobatic poise. Newman's sculpture is accompanied by several paintings, including a late De Kooning and a very late, exceptionally wide Monet, of the clouds reflected in his lily pond. Add to this the strained music of a tortuously twined calligraphic painting by Brice Marden and we have a kind of elegaic arcadia, complete with ruined statue. Somewhere above us is the New York sky, crowded in by buildings, the light falling through echoing architectural emptiness.

The top floor special exhibition galleries are dominated by James Rosenquist's F-111, his 1964-5 multi-panel work in which an image of the fighter plane is snarled up with montaged images of car tyres, patterns, a kid under a space-age hairdryer, coils of sick-looking spaghetti. But a plane, on the top of a building, in New York? Even museums have an unconscious, and say things they don't intend to.

This gallery, which is largely showing off its acres of oak flooring for the inaugural show, lies above Moma's collection, which makes its measured, magisterial and largely chronological way through the fifth and fourth floors. Here is the artistic core of the museum, a series of measured displays that are, largely, meant to remain permanent.

Moma's collection is pretty much unparalleled. What needs to be stated first of all is how good it is at telling what has become the canonical version of the story of modern art, from Cézanne onwards. Taniguchi's new galleries have human scale and a sense of progression. There is even a sense of surprise, turning a corner, or following a sightline, in finding out what comes next. The track lighting isn't overly fancy, and there are no irritating explanatory wall panels or horrible rope barriers, which destroy the experience of so much work at Tate Modern.

The more the works in Moma's holdings are reproduced, spun off into books and TV series, bought as posters and postcards, the more the story of the past 125 years is told through its collection. And it is a story that, for the most part, belongs to Europe, at least up until the second world war, unless, as I did, you make a wrong turn and begin at the end of the fifth floor galleries, with a little room in which one can find Edward Hopper's Gas and his House by the Railroad, Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World and Charles Sheeler's 1930 American Landscape, with its grain silos, chimneys, trains and canal.

The fifth floor galleries open with Cézanne, moving through post-impressionism to fauvism, making their way through stunning rooms devoted to Picasso and cubism, Matisse, Mondrian and surrealism, on and on until we come to a very odd room, another one of those subconscious slips. Matisse's four bronze Backs stand in a corner of the room. In the centre is Picasso's bulbous, distorted Head of a Woman, and on the walls his dirigible Bather with a Beach Ball and Girl Before a Mirror, plus a couple of Bonnards: The Bathroom and The Breakfast Room. All this sexuality, unbridled and repressed, appears to be making the Matisse reliefs turn their backs in shame, an arm raised as if to cover their eyes. At the same time, they're showing their naked behinds. Whose shame are we witnessing here? Oddly, this room, designated "School of Paris: 1930s", has more sex and Freud than all the stuff in the surrealist vitrines, and makes even Hans Bellmer appear strained in his appetites. How alive this room is, how much more devoted to pleasure than history.

On the fourth floor, a room of classic abstract expressionist paintings is a bit like being trapped in a lift with a bunch of belligerants. The Rothkos look dead; only Newman's Vir Sublimis sings from the wall. You get the best view of it in the next room, devoted to Pollock. But this Newman, of all his paintings, is best experienced close up, by walking along it. Or when someone passes between you and the painting. I feel much the same about Pollock: he's best when he fills your field of vision. The Rothkos, on the other hand, are probably best observed from several miles away, with several intervening walls.

I'm letting my prejudice show. But why not? Museums should be grateful that not everyone wants to see everything, especially not all at once. Is that why Howard Hodgkin is hung in a stairwell? Apparently not, because he has the company of a lovely Richard Diebenkorn Ocean Park painting, which owes so much to the internal architecture of Matisse's Piano Lesson. Diebenkorn has to be content to live with Matisse's The Dance, hung at the top of the stairs. If I were that painting, I'd want to hurl myself down those stairs. It's the worst hung work in the museum.

But not quite the worst installed. In a catch-all display of Minimal and postminimal art, a Dan Flavin fluorescent striplight casts its pinkish glow on all around it. The infinitessimaly differenciated tones of an Ad Reinhardt black painting are rendered utterly invisible, a Bridget Riley twangs in the glow, and one of Robert Ryman's white paintings blushes pink in Flavin's reflected aura. Somehow, everything looks like an example or an illustration rather than a thing in itself.

But, in the same display, it is useful to make comparisons between Beuys, early Nauman, Eva Hesse and the Brazilians Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica. Dialogues between American artists and their counterparts in Europe and Latin America are often more instructive than, say, hanging the abstract expressionists together as if they were still yelling at each other in the Cedar Tavern. Such alignments may make things complicated for those who would see Moma only as a lifesize, pop-up compendium of modern art, but for the rest of us it alleviates the relentless tramp through official history.

Back on the piano nobile are the new, double height contemporary galleries. A Gordon Matta-Clark section of a sawed-up building, a Rachel Whiteread cast room and an arrangement of wardrobe and chairs filled with concrete by Doris Calcedo say something about artists' relationship to domestic architecture and space, while new paintings by Chris Ofili, Peter Doig, Elizabeth Peyton and Luc Tuymans is a snapshot of particular modern manners. But it's all a bit piecemeal, and lacks the coherence of the upper floors.

For all the caveats, Moma is a great museum. It's big and, at 20 bucks, expensive. Yet it's worth it, even just to wander through the photography galleries for an hour, or to lose oneself in the wonderful drawing or print collections. Whether Moma is the museum best placed to collect not the art of our time but the art of the future is another matter. Current American art doesn't seem to matter to the degree it once did. And Moma shows us that, to a large extent, the art that has counted most in its history has been made elsewhere.

[Kris]

ARCHITECTURE

Modern love?

The new, expanded MoMA in New York works beautifully as a frame for art -- if not as architecture

By Robert Campbell, Globe Correspondent | November 17, 2004

NEW YORK -- Don't go for the architecture. Go for the art.

It's great to walk into the new, greatly expanded Museum of Modern Art in New York, which opens to the public Saturday, and see all the old friends on the walls, those paintings that have become as much a part of the lives of many of us as our neighbors and relatives. They're beautifully displayed and lit, and they're a joy to welcome back.

The architecture, though, is a letdown. It isn't bad, it's just uninteresting. It's the old MoMA all over again, only bigger. Here are the same-old same-old white walls and ceiling track lights, and then more white walls and more ceiling track lights. You feel like a lab rat in a snow maze. There's no attempt to create memorable architectural space for the artworks to inhabit. Instead, seeing them spotlighted on these placeless, anonymous white walls is like seeing isolated images on a screen in an academic slide lecture.

The architect is Yoshio Taniguchi of Japan, 67, whose design won in a rigorous competition with other invited architects. The MoMA was looking for a newcomer, not an established star, and this is Taniguchi's first building outside Japan. He's been quoted as saying he wanted to make the architecture disappear, and he's pretty much done that. The detailing is often elegant, but it's the kind of elegance that hides things. Walls, for example, don't seem to meet the floor or ceiling. They are separated by recessed shadow joints that make them appear to float, as if they had no mass or weight -- as if they were, in fact, projection screens.

The overall organization is simple. All of the old MoMA has been either demolished or renovated; it's now seamless with the new addition. The ground floor is a lobby and restaurant space, the second floor has the highest ceilings and shows the newest work, and then as you work your way upward you move backward in time, so that the early modern work, the beloved Cezannes and the like, are near the top. The uppermost gallery floor, the sixth, is another tall space for contemporary art. This is the only mildly interesting gallery, with a couple of standard skylights and some fat columns that suggest the possibility of a richer spatial experience. Still higher are smaller floors for museum offices.

Taniguchi does make a couple of gestures to break the monotony. One is a tall atrium space that rises upward through the middle of the museum from the second level. As you traverse the galleries, you come to places that overlook the atrium. You also encounter rectangular wall openings that open views into it. The hope is that the atrium will keep you oriented, because you'll always know where you are in relation to it. It doesn't work. I guarantee that every visitor will wander lost at one point or another. And the acoustics in the atrium are so reverberant that already it has proven unusable for social gatherings.

The other gesture, first suggested by Bernard Tschumi, former dean of the architecture school at Columbia, is what Tschumi calls "chutes and ladders," after the children's game. These are vertical shortcuts, stairways from one floor to another, enabling you to quickly bypass what you don't want to see without returning to the central escalators. They're a response to a criticism sometimes made of the old MoMA, which was that once you entered the galleries there was only one way through them, a "conveyor belt" on which you felt trapped. The chutes and ladders, by contrast, give you a not unpleasant sense, since you're probably lost anyway, of being an explorer in uncharted tundra.

The MoMA has deliberately chosen not to follow the path of some other famous museums, such as the two Guggenheims in Bilbao, Spain, and New York, where the architecture calls attention to itself and sometimes upstages the art. Taniguchi's work avoids that kind of flamboyance. His architecture is that of the high period of modernism in the middle of the last century, a world of floating abstract planes, of collage and transparency. Taniguchi loves semitransparent glass walls that resemble scrims or diaphanous veils. He also likes the kind of generic loftlike space that doesn't shout its presence, but instead lets the contents be the statement.

There's nothing wrong with any of that, up to a point. But then you think of some other museums of recent years and what they accomplish with light. The Kimball Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and the Yale Center for British Art by Louis Kahn; the Kunsthaus in Bregenz, Austria, by Peter Zumthor; the Beyeler Foundation in Basel, Switzerland, and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, by Renzo Piano; the Dia:Beacon in Beacon, N.Y. -- these and others bring daylight into a relationship with the art in a way that seems to charge the very air with life. Once you've experienced that, the old white-wall, track-light gallery feels cramped and inadequate. The difference can be subtle: The Dia, for instance, is all-white too, but the white comes in several delicately different shades, flooded with daylight that modulates with the weather. Of course, the MoMA doesn't have the advantage, as most of these others do, of being a single-story building with the possibility of skylights everywhere. But it doesn't even take full advantage of the top floor it does possess, unlike the marvelous multistory Yale museum. The Bregenz museum is multistory, too.

A minor problem with the minimal aesthetic is that it foregrounds stuff you don't want to see. Things like the backlighted red exit signs obtrude themselves as if they, too, like the sometimes similar Ed Ruscha paintings, are works of art. Doors and access panels are cut into walls and ceilings without frames, in the hope of making them disappear. Of course they don't; they merely mess up the minimalist perfection.

This writer gravitated to the galleries that display architecture and design. Here the objects -- classic modern chairs, lamps, a motorcycle, a car -- now stand on what appear to be floating ice floes, white raftlike shapes that separate you from the objects, as if you are looking at them across water. The objects are superb, but the floes present them self-consciously, as if they are carefully arranged store merchandise. I don't know the right way to show, in a museum, objects that were originally created to gather with other objects in useful and harmonious living rooms. But treating them as isolated art objects isn't it.

It should be noted that Taniguchi, almost from the moment he won the MoMA competition, worked in close collaboration with the New York architectural firm Kohn Pedersen Fox, as well as with a committee of MoMA curators. KPF is largely responsible for figuring out how to build Taniguchi's delicate kind of architecture in the sometimes brutal world of New York construction. Knotty problems included, for example, threading the new addition through the lower three floors of Museum Tower, an apartment high-rise. Those floors are now part of the museum. You can learn more about Taniguchi from a fine exhibit on the third floor about nine of his museums in Japan. A few of the MoMA's public spaces, such as the museum store and the cafe and restaurant (not yet open), were designed by other architects.

My final problem with the MoMA is the exterior. You can enter from either side, on West 53d or 54th Street, into a vast, rather featureless lobby that runs all the way through the building and opens out sideways to frame a view of the famous sculpture garden designed in 1953 by Philip Johnson, now restored. The 53d Street frontage is unmemorable but pleasant, thanks largely to the fact that it includes the restored facade of the 1939-era MoMA, by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durrell Stone. The older facade provides variety and a sense of time. The 54th Street frontage, on the other hand, is hideous. MoMA now occupies most of a city block, and this frontage is one huge blank wall -- some black, some white, some glass, interrupted only by the entrance and by a service dock. Nothing about it responds to the fact that it's on a lively midtown Manhattan street. It's deader than the back of a big-box retailer in Omaha.

"It's all about the art," one curator said to me. Yes it is, and that's too bad. MoMA's new building should also be about the quality of the space and light the art inhabits. And it should be about the city the museum lives in.

Robert Campbell can be reached at camglobe@aol.com.

www.boston.com

[Kris]

Review: The new MoMA

The understated allure of the renovated Museum of Modern Art

By Justin Davidson and Ariella Budick
Staff Writers

November 18, 2004

From 54th Street, the new Museum of Modern Art looks like a vast limousine, with dark-tinted windows and polished black skin. Ostentatiously discreet, it hints at important and glamorous goings-on inside. The museum teases passers-by with a glimpse of a red sports car preening in a third-floor window, but hides the outdoor sculptures behind a garden wall. The price of seeing these treasures up close is steep at $20 a ticket (Saturday's grand re-opening is free), but the building, which cost $425 million, projects an aloof confidence that it's worth every dime.

It is. The exquisitely refined architecture of Yoshio Taniguchi rescues gridded glass and steel from corporate cliché, imbuing midtown modernism with a sacramental air. The interior glows with a gauzy light, and every line and slender plane has been honed to flatter the luminous contents. The new Modern is an elegant envelope for an unsurpassed collection of 20th Century art shimmering against expanses of pristine white.

Anyone expecting a museum in the theatrical, exuberant vein of the Guggenheim extravaganza that Frank Gehry bestowed on Bilbao will be disappointed. MoMA is not thrilling, dazzling or emotive. It seduces with a murmur. There are no panels crammed with historical background, no interactive gizmos, no flashy displays, not even a peach-hued wall -- nothing to distract from the stark potency of the work.

The Museum of Modern Art began in a townhouse in 1929, acquired its first made-to-order home a decade later and has grown fitfully along its midtown block ever since. With the latest expansion, which absorbs its previous incarnations and increases gallery space from 85,000 to 120,000 square feet, MoMA has metamorphosed into a juggernaut that requires more than a single day to experience in its full breadth and detail. It has become a Met moderne.

The scale unfolds in stages. A public indoor boulevard from 53rd to 54th Street now cuts through the building, but it's not until you have had your ticket torn that the museum's dimensions open up. A wall of lush black granite pierces a skylight and sends the eye gliding up and out over the dark reflective surface of Cesar Pelli's Museum Tower. Ahead, past a grand glass curtain, is the sculpture garden, slightly enlarged but still intimate and bounded like a cloister.

A flight of stairs leads up to a cathedral-like atrium, in which even Barnett Newman's colossal sculpture "Broken Obelisk" seems puny. It's an awesome, asymmetrical space suffused with shadows and opaline daylight, at once sublime and oppressive. The five-story walls rise, unadorned for now, waiting until mere mortals dare to paint on the easels of giants. At the top, a platform linked to the perimeter by vertiginous bridges surveys the void. A vertical slice in the wall reveals a crisscrossing set of stairs. The whole arrangement of planes and perforations, of darkness and crisp detail, evokes the fantastical prisons conjured in the 18th century by Giovanni Battista Piranesi.

Size has allowed each department to spread and stretch. In painting and sculpture, the curators are now able to highlight the particular genius of each work by encircling it with a generous buffer zone of neutral space. Taniguchi has set aside the most capacious galleries and highest ceilings for contemporary art, which has pride of place on the second floor. Perhaps one day the curators will figure out what to do with this loft, but for now the installation seems perfunctory and scattered, with even the most voluminous pieces, such as Rachel Whiteread's "Room," rattling around in all that empty volume.

The biggest news occurs in the smaller departments: drawings, prints and photographs, which in the old building were confined to cramped quarters or to storage. Now the photography galleries open with a lingering prelude, a group of Eugène Atget's moody pictures of the park at Saint-Cloud. The display then ambles through the rest of the medium's history at a luxurious pace, pausing for half a roomful of Robert Franks and ending up with a whole wall to spare for a gimongous Andreas Gursky. In making the leap to a new order of magnitude, however, the Modern has declined to reinvent itself. It still aspires to tell the definitive story of the 20th century in art, with an 1890s introduction and a post-2000 coda. The new painting and sculpture galleries allow for multiple pathways through this tale, but the old heroes continue to loom. Picasso emerges as securely enthroned as ever, and Pollock has not lost so much as a fringe of his prophet's cloak.

To understand just how radically conservative this approach is, it helps to consider Tate Modern, which opened four years ago in London. There, in a former power station redone in dilapidated chic, viewers hopscotch through history in a series of thematic installations with such titles as "Nude/Action/Body" and "History/Memory/Society." The layout frustrates any attempt to grasp the most basic chronology or figure out who influenced whom.

MoMA has rejected the Tate's trendiness with silent contempt, preferring to wrap itself in a cloak of immaculate classicism. This is a collection so dominant, so awash in iconic images -- Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," Van Gogh's "Starry Night," Matisse's "The Dance," Cézanne's "Bather," Warhol's "Gold Marilyn Monroe" -- that the museum has no incentive to question the canon. MoMA owns the canon.

Big as it is, the Modern has favored clarity over comprehensiveness. The story it tells of the avant-garde is one of formal innovations, technical breakthroughs and an inexorable drive to abstraction. Cézanne's broken planes begat the analytical cubism of Picasso and Braque, which eventually brought forth the flat geometries of Mondrian.

Taniguchi's building launches Mondrian into three dimensions, linking the overlapping grids of modernist painting with those of Manhattan. Windows in the galleries frame the museum's severe compositions of rectilinear planes and the glittering, angular panorama of midtown beyond. The architect curates our perceptions of New York, holding it up as a cubist cityscape.

In this cerebral context, intensely expressive painters such as Oskar Kokoshka or Ludwig Kirchner feel marginal, like historical detours. Francis Bacon's 1946 untitled painting of animal carcasses splayed on a rack looks extreme, even hysterical next to Picasso's "The Charnel House," which, though terrifying in its own way, is austere by comparison. When violence and disgust appear, they seem like breaches of decorum, less shocking than simply vulgar.

This channeled flow makes much American art -- everything except orthodox Abstract Expressionism and cool pop -- seem entirely peripheral, the sort of thing you might hang in a stairwell or next to an elevator. MoMA has done just that. A decorative abstraction by Stuart Davis, a lone Georgia O'Keeffe painting of a shadowed doorway and a coolly precise Gerald Murphy still-life brightens a dim corridor next to an escalator. A couple of Richard Diebenkorn's pastel-hued landscapes huddle at the foot of a staircase like a bunch of disreputable relatives. And Andrew Wyeth's celebrated "Christina's World" is exiled to a nether vestibule, along with the work of Edward Hopper.

Every museum has its omissions, but MoMA's disregard for Americans who don't fit the official line is all the more breathtaking because of the building's scope. Two floors of painting and sculpture are still not ample enough to include Fairfield Porter, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, John Marin, Philip Pearlstein, or Alex Katz. Even Larry Rivers' "Washington Crossing the Delaware," one of the museum's marquee paintings, is absent.

Fortunately, the rooms with works on paper offer a corrective counterpoint to the paintings and sculpture department. "Roger and Angelica," a bejeweled and dreamy watercolor by Odilon Redon that glimmers in deepest lapis, O'Keeffe's early "Evening Star III" and Egon Schiele's fiercely erotic "Girl With Black Hair" all suggest a more intricate set of histories.

Taniguchi has done his part to arrange for accidental encounters and distant peeks. Matisse's "The Dance" appears through one upper window, visible from various levels of the atrium. So do a bright red Campari poster in the design department and a massive color-block sculpture by Donald Judd.

Touring the Modern is a bit like walking around an exhibitionistic city after dark, when raised curtains offer glimpses of obscure domestic dramas and outré décor.

But it is only a little like that. MoMA is too meticulously choreographed to allow any unscripted epiphanies. While on the streets outside, high art mingles promiscuously with low and styles hybridize rampantly, within these serene precincts, categories endure and Quality still rules.

In the 20th century, modern art offered itself up as an antidote to global war and howling passions. The original MoMA was a local institution that cultivated novelty, but it acquired more universal solemnity with each new patch of real estate. The new museum is more hunkered down and highfalutin' than ever, a monastic bulwark against barbarism and cheapness.

Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.

[Kris]

Video: Inside the new MoMA (http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/nyc-moma-video,0,4914263.realvideo?coll=ny-entertainment-headlines)

[Kris]

Oedipus on 53rd St.

by Hilton Kramer

Of the many criticisms one can make of the new, grossly expanded and grossly expensive Museum of Modern Art (it’s reported to have cost more than $850 million), the most unexpected—by this writer, anyway—is that almost everything about it has the character of an anachronism. Instead of a forward-looking, truly innovative plan for both the new gallery space and the new installation of the museum’s permanent collection, we’re constantly recalled to the many ways in which the new MoMA remains mired in the arguments and conventions of its own past. As a consequence of this reluctance to make a fresh start for a very different period and a very different public, the new MoMA is full of reminders of the successes and blunders of the old MoMA.

The first and gravest of our disappointments is with the ill-conceived architecture. Yoshio Taniguchi’s redesign has at every turn in its cold and elephantine structure the look and feel of a Japanese parody of the kind of American modernism that has itself long outlived its expiration date. Thus the galleries are essentially an architectural assemblage of—what else?—bleak, oversized white boxes in which the scale of the interior space and the unrelieved whiteness of the walls conspire to discomfort the viewer while diminishing the aesthetic integrity of works of art marooned in an environment remarkably hostile to the pleasures of the eye.

These unwelcoming exhibition spaces would under any circumstances entail considerable problems for the installation of MoMA’s permanent collection—and these problems are compounded by the apparent determination of the curatorial staff to come up with a scheme that would emphatically be seen to resemble as little as possible the classic installations of the late Alfred Barr, MoMA’s founding director. This has been achieved by a systematic deconstruction of Barr’s pioneering work in establishing a coherent, stylistically oriented history of modernist art. Barr created programs and diagrams that trace a succession of aesthetic influences and intellectual linkages that constitute a history of modernism; his installations were based on this historical scenario, which for generations of artists and critics became the accepted way of comprehending the modern tradition of art.

What does it mean, then, to speak of a modern "tradition," which some artists and writers on art regard as anathema to the fundamental spirit of modernism? The best answer to this question was given to us by John Szarkowski, for many years the curator of photography in the old MoMA. In Looking at Photographs (1973), Mr. Szarkowski wrote:

"Non-artists often misunderstand the nature of artistic tradition, and imagine it to be something similar to a fortress, within which eternal verity is protected from the present. In fact it is something more useful and interesting, and less secure. It exists in the minds of artists, and consists of their collective memory of what has been accomplished so far. Its function is to mark the starting point for each day’s work. Occasionally it is decided that tradition should also define the work’s end result. At this point the tradition dies."

That’s the spirit in which Barr labored to codify the history of modernist art, and to this day I daresay that no other writer on the subject has succeeded in improving on his work. Yet, precisely because Barr’s conception of the modern tradition acquired a kind of orthodoxy, it was inevitable that it would also in time provoke some categorical dissent—and so it has. The new MoMA, in effect, has transformed itself into the principal voice of the anti-Barr opposition. Thus, in a long essay marking the inauguration of the new MoMA, the museum’s chief curator, John Elderfield, writes with unconcealed glee that "By a happy coincidence … on the fortieth anniversary of Barr’s installation, a truly new one could be created from scratch."

In Mr. Elderfield’s view, what went wrong in the Barr installation was that "The painting and sculpture galleries had become unduly hermetic, prescriptive, and progressive in their linear, spinal arrangement—the viewer needed sanction to slow down—while the small size of the individual galleries no longer served the requirements of an intimate address to the works of art." Mr. Elderfield is a writer and curator whose endeavors in the past I have, for the most part, greatly admired. But I nonetheless have to say that just about everything in the sentence I’ve just quoted strikes me as utter bosh. I’ve been a regular visitor of MoMA, following its many changes, for some 50 years, and Mr. Elderfield’s notion that visitors ever needed a "sanction" to moderate their pace in looking at works of art is tendentious nonsense.

What has categorically changed at MoMA is the way the museum presents works of art to its public. Heretofore, MoMA’s presentation was largely based on a formalist-historical model in which the aesthetics of style was given priority over subject matter or thematic motifs. Four years ago, in the series of MoMA 2000 exhibitions, we were put on notice that the formalist-historical model would now be rejected by MoMA in favor of an emphasis on the subject matter of art. One of the consequences of that decision was that the entire history of abstract art was fractured and rendered incoherent as its various phases were assigned to "subjects" which could rarely, if ever, be discernible to the naked eye. On that occasion, anyway, Mr. Elderfield apologized—sort of—for failing to do justice to the history of abstraction. Yet the mistakes of 2000 have been repeated in the installations of 2004.

What we encounter in many of the so-called "subject galleries" in the new MoMA are works of art that have been orphaned from history—from the aesthetic history from which they derive their ideas and from the history of their influence on later works of art. All aesthetic experience is comparative, and the quality of our experience of individual works of art often depends on the relation that obtains between the object before us and our memories of other works of art. In such comparisons, style rather than subject provides the principal linkage. This is one reason why the quality and character of installations in museum exhibitions is so crucial to our comprehension of art.

In the old MoMA, a masterwork like Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon offered an experience that the visitor carried in the mind through an encounter with the entire history of Cubist painting. At the new MoMA, Les Demoiselles is so historically isolated that it looks as if it had been not so much installed as simply abandoned. The same may be said of the sculpture of Wilhelm Lehmbruck—and much else. And once again, as in 2000, the history of abstract art is a mess.

It’s one of the further curiosities of the new MoMA that while Mr. Elderfield dwells at length on the achievements of Alfred Barr, just about everything Barr stood for in the realm of responsible museology is repudiated in this inaugural installation. It’s almost enough to persuade one to believe in Freud’s Oedipus complex.

You may reach Hilton Kramer via email at: hkramer@observer.com.

This column ran on page 1 in the 11/22/2004 edition of The New York Observer.

[Jasonik]

Excellent critique.

The MOMA suffers from an overfetishization of the object. Lack of context causes one to doubt the greatness of a work in some cases so much that it seems an arbitrary example of a particular style or period, and not the significant artistic pinnacle it may rightfully be.

[Edward]

MoMA on opening day 20 November 2004.

http://www.wirednewyork.com/museums/moma/moma_54th.jpg (http://www.wirednewyork.com/museums/moma/)

[Edward]

Anyone paid a visit?

[NYatKNIGHT]

Anyone paid a visit?

Not yet, soon though.

Friday nights are free.

[Kris]

Architecture That Blends In And Stands Out

By Benjamin Forgey
Washington Post Staff Writer

Saturday, November 20, 2004; Page C01

MoMA's New Look (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/flash/photo/travel/2004-11-18_moma/metaRefresh.htm)

NEW YORK -- Nothing better becomes the latest version of the Museum of Modern Art than a leisurely stroll through its galleries and public spaces.

The art still comes first, of course. MoMA's nonpareil collection of 20th-century painting and sculpture was largely unavailable for three years during the museum's expansion, and it is good to have it back, as it were, in circulation.

But if a visitor wants to come to terms with the architecture of the new MoMA, to grasp its elusive qualities and experience its subtle excitements, then there is only one thing to do: Walk, slowly, among its rooms, anterooms, corridors and lobbies. Pause when the fancy strikes for a particular view or work of art. Stop at one of the two cafes to rest awhile.

And then, do it all over again.

Movement through these sociable, affecting spaces is the key to appreciating Yoshio Taniguchi's artful architecture, which is so elegantly matter-of-fact when seen from the outside.

Taniguchi, 67, was the eldest among the 10 architects invited seven years ago to compete for the complex, prestigious MoMA commission. Having worked exclusively in Japan, he was not widely known, and his selection surprised many in the architectural world.

Yet it's clear that the MoMA folks knew exactly what they were doing when they put Taniguchi on the list. As if to underline the point, Terence Riley, chief curator of the museum's department of architecture and design, organized an exhibition for the opening titled "Yoshio Taniguchi: Nine Museums."

Documenting eight museum projects in Japan plus the MoMA design, the show demonstrates how, with painstaking intensity, Taniguchi honed his skills over the years. It's almost as if all along he had been preparing for the MoMA prize.

Taniguchi's aesthetic of pure abstraction, developed from the same roots that fed Philip Goodwin and Edward Durrell Stone when they designed the original building on West 53rd Street in the late 1930s, fits the MoMA mission. Unlike some of the other competition entries, Taniguchi's design is not a thing of the moment. Rather, it strongly implies a continuity of modernist architecture.

Equally important, Taniguchi's approach combines sophisticated engineering with place-sensitive design. One can easily spot certain favorite themes in the work, such as a preference for open portico forms on a very large scale, yet each design clearly was created for a specific client in a particular location.

Indeed, the MoMA design is like an enormous, complicated, site-specific sculpture. The museum had grown in increments over the decades, but this time around, Director Glenn Lowry made it clear that the museum did not want just another discrete addition, no matter how distinguished.

Rather, Lowry wrote, if the museum were to meet the challenges of the future, "it had to create a new museum," not only bigger but different. New kinds of spaces and spatial relationships were called for, he emphasized, and it all had to be tied together on the tight midtown Manhattan site. (MoMA had provided the expansion room by purchasing and demolishing an adjacent hotel on 54th Street in the mid-1990s.)

Taniguchi responded with confidence and sophistication. He proposed selective demolition of existing buildings. He designed different facade treatments on the south and north, in accordance with the specific qualities of 53rd and 54th streets. He provided, for the first time, a through connection on the ground floor, with entrances on both streets.

As asked, he provided a variety of spaces for art display -- big, high, columnless spaces for contemporary art; smaller rooms for MoMA's permanent collection of easel-scale paintings and human-scale sculptures, and even more intimate contained galleries for photographs and works on paper.

Furthermore, Taniguchi linked new and reconstituted old spaces by focusing the whole composition on the splendid sculpture garden designed in 1953 by Philip Johnson. And he accounted for all the needed expansion space -- nearly doubling the museum's physical size -- with new buildings both east and west of the sculpture garden.

Thus, the most dramatic exterior changes are visible on 54th Street. To the east of the garden rises a medium-size building for education and research. To the west is the new exhibition wing and, behind that, a new mid-rise tower for administrative offices.

The architect also reshaped the edges of the sculpture garden and rebuilt all of the northern facades -- the back ends of the 53rd Street buildings -- so that the composition reads as a convincing whole. The scene is now quietly impressive. Every surface is crisply sheathed with thin membranes of glass, metal or stone. And two of those Taniguchi porticoes, characteristically huge, face each other across the length of the garden.

On the 53rd Street side Taniguchi preferred to preserve, as he put it, MoMA's "record of regeneration." Thus the iconic white Goodwin-Stone building remains. So does Johnson's elegant steel-and-glass facade of 1964 immediately to the east and, of course, Cesar Pelli's sleek 1984 residential tower to the west, whose lower floors are part of the MoMA complex.

To the west of that, a new Taniguchi facade, in dark reflective glass, completes the composition. Multiple entryways now enliven the street -- there's one for the museum's upscale restaurant, the Modern; the Goodwin-Stone doorway, restored to its original modern curve; the residential entry; MoMA's new main entrance; a door to a spacious new bookstore; and access to museum offices.

All of this exterior work is smart and fairly low-key. Unlike many museums designed from the 1980s onward, this is one you could almost pass by without notice. (It is worth recalling that Taniguchi did his initial design in 1997, the year that the shimmering shapes of Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim wowed the world.)

The new MoMA is an attractive integrated collection of buildings, each with its own delicately detailed surface. Only by being inside the buildings, however, does one begin to comprehend the degree of integration among them. You learn the new MoMA, and learn to love its architecture, by moving about its interior spaces.

At first, there's almost nothing. From either 53rd or 54th Street you enter a long, wide, rather low-ceilinged blank space with white walls and an attractive slate floor. You buy tickets or make reservations at long black tables made of stone.

It is an oft-used architectural device, of course, to deploy a compressed space as an entryway to a more expansive one. But unlike, say, a medieval cathedral, here the transition is gradual. You can get but a glimpse of great height from this ground-floor corridor. The real impact doesn't hit until after you've ascended a graceful stairwell to the second floor.

There, on a platform shared by "Broken Obelisk," Barnett Newman's mammoth bronze, many first-time visitors will do a 360-degree turn, looking up and around at a tall open space, not easily decipherable despite its 110-foot height. One senses right away that this will be the beginning of a journey with many routes and many surprises.

One senses, too, that Taniguchi has planned it all with the skill of a sensitive choreographer or expert landscape gardener. Throughout the spiraling journey in the six tall floors of the new wing or the lower-ceilinged galleries of the Goodwin-Stone building, the visitor again and again will find himself crossing the central atrium. All paths, eventually, lead to it.

In this, it is very like the atrium of I.M. Pei's 1978 East Building of the National Gallery of Art. In most respects, however, Taniguchi's atrium is a very different sort of place. Unlike Pei's triangulated atrium, for instance, this one is based entirely upon right angles. Nor is it wide open, with almost all points visible from all others. Nor is it bathed in natural light from an astonishing skylight.

Rather, because its configuration differs from floor to floor (except on the fourth and fifth, where it is the same), the space is subtly, or sometimes dramatically, unpredictable. There are six bridges and more than a dozen openings of different sizes cut into its soaring white walls.

In consequence, not only does a visitor repeatedly cross the space during the stroll, he also is constantly looking into it -- down, up or across. The openings vary in dimension, from nine-foot squares, say, to rectangles more than 40 feet tall, and they frame views of artwork and people on different floors. It all makes for an exceedingly pleasing, dynamic (and sometimes even a bit dizzying) spatial experience.

Likewise, openings in the exterior walls are many and carefully calculated. Dazzling views into the garden through glass walls contrast with framed views through tall niches in the architecture. Glass panels with white ceramic frit give an entirely different feel to the outside than do views through the dark tinted glass, which make New York seem a city without sun. The effect, in sum, is to intensify one's awareness of both outside and inside, of architecture, nature and city.

And, it is almost needless to say, the architecture in some way helps to intensify one's experience of the art. That's the aim every time a new museum is built, but it doesn't always work. Happily, it did happen here.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

[TLOZ Link5]

Mixed reviews, it seems.

[fioco]

Reimagining MoMA
Perfect harmony of drama, understatement

By Blair Kamin
Chicago Tribune architecture critic
Published November 21, 2004

NEW YORK -- Think of a cool shower on a steamy summer day. It makes your skin tingle. It clears your head. Well, the new Museum of Modern Art, which reopened to the public Saturday after a $425 million renovation and expansion, is that bracing shower: a work of architecture that is serene, urbane and blissfully understated. It is just the right solution for the museum that houses the world's premier collection of modern art. And it is exactly what the world of architecture needs now after the rash of euphoric, look-at-me museums that were more about creating spectacular objects than contemplative settings where people could gaze at art.

In this, his first project in the United States, Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi has saved the best parts of the old MoMA and forged them into a much larger and exquisite urban whole. He has proved equally adept at striking a balance between MoMA's killer cache of paintings and sculptures and his classically modern idiom. Not blandly neutral, but quietly distinctive, his building and its visual drama unfold as unexpectedly -- and as powerfully -- as a concerto by Mozart.

This is something new, or rather, something old that seems new again. In contrast to the spectacle buildings, the museum serves as a frame for viewing art rather than a form whose principal purpose is to draw publicity and tourists. The container and the contained are in perfect harmony. Though this restrained approach has yielded compromises and disappointments, such as a soaring atrium that doesn't yet make the spirit soar, the overall result feels ordered and inevitable. Sometimes, doing what's right is more important than doing what's radical. Evolution beats revolution.

Think back to 1997 when MoMA picked the Harvard-educated Taniguchi from a field of 10 architects, including such avant-garde heavyweights as Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. Los Angeles architect Frank Gehry had just opened his explosively sculptural Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. The choice of Taniguchi, who had completed a series of elegantly minimalist museums in Japan, struck many as predictable, even boring.

How times change. Today, with so many lesser talents following Gehry's brilliant but hard-to-match example, the sculptural "wow" building is practically a cliche. Taniguchi's crisp, right-angled design thus seems remarkably fresh, as if architecture, having overheated in the 1990s, had taken a cool shower and emerged stripped of its baroque excess.

A transformation

In truth, the project's success is as much a matter of planning as of style. In nearly doubling MoMA's overall size to 630,000 square feet, Taniguchi has transformed a museum that had grown incrementally and awkwardly over the decades into a coherent yet vibrant modernist collage. Some intimacy inevitably has been sacrificed, but the trade-off is a significant increase in space and spatial quality.

The museum has gained more room to display its extraordinary collection (it now has 125,000 square feet of exhibition space -- 50 percent more than before the renovation and triple what it had 20 years ago). It also has a new flexibility, dispensing with the old straight-shot sequence through its galleries and affording viewers a variety of visually enticing pathways as they move from Cezanne to Rothko to the artists of today.

These are the essential additions (and subtractions) to the landmark museum complex on West 53rd and 54th Streets just off the shopping mecca of Fifth Avenue: Along West 54th, an old hotel and some old brownstones are gone, replaced by six-story gallery and education buildings that are clad in glass and granite and flank the museum's serene, Philip Johnson-designed sculpture garden. The gallery building provides the museum's first entrance along West 54th and a new entrance on West 53rd. A wide through-block passageway, open to non-museumgoers, joins the entrances, bringing the bustle of the city into the museum as never before.

More startling is the removal of the museum's garden hall, a greenhouselike enclosure that was appended to the back, or garden side, of the museum as part of a controversial 1984 expansion by New Haven architect Cesar Pelli. (The expansion added an income-producing midblock residential tower and six floors of museum space at its base). The garden hall rose the full height of the museum, housing escalators leading to galleries. Originally showered with praise, it turned out to be a banal, shopping malllike space, an uninspired imitation of the glassed-in escalators that slither up the Pompidou Center in Paris. Its disappearance is a blessing.

Yet even as Taniguchi takes away Pelli's garden hall, he showcases Pelli's tower, treating it as a found object that emphasizes Manhattan's soaring verticality. The museum structures that once obscured the tower's base, reflecting MoMA's uneasiness with the tower, are gone. The tower comes straight down to the sculpture garden, forming a campanile for the museum. This is Taniguchi at his best. He's a skilled gardener doing selective pruning, not a madman hacking through the garden with a scythe.

'39 building preserved

Perhaps his wisest move was the decision to preserve the museum's original 1939 building along West 53rd, a once-shocking International Style intruder designed by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone. Following a renovation overseen by Kohn Pedersen Fox of New York (the firm also served as the executive architect for the museum building project), the building dazzles with its glistening white marble skin and piano-curve canopy. It now serves as the entrance to the museum's theaters and restaurant. Just as alluring is Johnson's 1964 expansion along 53rd, also renovated, which flaunts a once-heretical facade of curving steel.

Not only do these side-by-side buildings play off beautifully against each other. They preserve the delicate scale and soul of the side street, a major accomplishment because the greatly enlarged museum could have been a blockbuster.

The lone weakness comes just west of Pelli's tower, where Taniguchi has placed his addition along West 53rd and his adjoining granite and glass facades form a muddy melange. Along with a sleek new office tower for museum workers and Pelli's now-drab, patterned-glass tower, they makes this part of MoMA look dull and corporate, as if it were the headquarters of Modernism Inc.

But any echoes of bland corporate modernism disappear along West 54th where the new education and gallery wings are as sublime and refined as Japanese temples. They exude a sleek, black-tie formality, but they're not too formal, their square cutouts in their facades resembling winking eyes. The contrast is classically Japanese: An overarching formality is broken up with playful surprises. The irrational tempers the rational, a yin-yang formula for architectural delight.

Taniguchi plays the same game inside, where visitors move from the low-ceilinged through-block passageway into an entry court where a skylit, 110-foot-tall atrium soars above.

The sculpture garden, now restored to its original size, is directly ahead, its centrality reaffirmed. Escalators and elevators are hidden behind the walls, a reversal of Pelli's garden hall. An off-center modern stair leads up to the atrium.

Atrium needs bolder art

The atrium, as this point, is underwhelming. The big, squarish volume of space needs more boldly scaled art to add to the punch of Barnett Newman's "Broken Obelisk." Even so, Taniguchi's basic moves -- and the messages they send -- are sound: The atrium forms an extension of the galleries that pinwheel around it. It is urbane, not suburban; about culture, not commerce. Further emphasizing the connection with art, Taniguchi slices a two-story window into a wall near the top of the atrium, revealing Matisse's joyful "Dance."

Half the fun of the galleries is getting there; exit the elevators and escalators and you are greeted with exquisitely framed views of the sculpture garden and the midtown Manhattan cityscape -- Chippendale highboy skyscrapers and the like. Equally compelling are Taniguchi's new switchback stair between the fourth and fifth floors and the restored, sensuously curving "Bauhaus stair" between two and three. They recall MoMA's original domestic scale, breaking down the new vast building into a series of "museums within a museum."

In a bold move sure to rile traditionalists, Taniguchi inverts MoMA's old order of things, beginning the chronological sequence of the painting and sculpture collection on the fifth floor and leading down to four. He puts other departments on three and contemporary art on two (temporary installations will go on six). The placement of the contemporary galleries in such a public place decisively brings MoMA into the present, making it as much a museum of contemporary art as a museum of the history of modern art. Whether the museum's curators can walk that tightrope between past and present remains to be seen.

The galleries themselves perfectly accommodate the art they contain, their varying ceiling heights creating just the right proportions. Often criticized as "white cubes," the galleries hardly appear clinical when you're looking at such revolutionary works as Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon." The simple backdrop makes the art seem all the more radical.

What is baffling (and always has been, at least to me, about MoMA) is the utter absence of explanatory wall text. How can a museum devoted to spreading the gospel of modern art say almost nothing about the art on its walls? In addition, despite the presence of two cafes overlooking the sculpture garden, Taniguchi appears to have given short shrift to facilities designed to relieve "museum fatigue." There simply aren't enough benches in the galleries. Visitors deserve more creature comforts.

But those are quibbles. On the whole, the new MoMA soars. Architecture, it remind us, isn't about slapdash train-wreck designs that are today's magazine cover and tomorrow's forgotten fashion. It is about the enduring craft of building and the subtle accretion of character that makes museums and their cities intensely rich places. These are the deep rudders of architecture, and Taniguchi's greatest contribution, beyond his splendidly refined building, is to have affirmed them.[/size]

Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune

Images from the BBC News, Copyright 2004
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[fioco]

Miracle on 54th Street
The building is beautifully simple, the placing of the works inspired - New York's new Museum of Modern Art is a triumph

Gaby Wood
Sunday November 21, 2004
The Observer

Museum of Modern Art New York

When he inaugurated New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1939, Franklin Delano Roosevelt chose to dedicate it, with an optimism that went unrewarded, 'to the cause of peace and to the pursuits of peace'. 'In encouraging the creation and enjoyment of beautiful things,' the President proclaimed, 'we are furthering democracy itself.'

Well, times have certainly changed and New Yorkers are still smarting from an election they feel gave democracy a bad name. But the Museum of Modern Art has reopened its doors, after a four-year, $858-million overhaul which has resulted in a spectacular new home nearly twice the size of the original.

But the new Modern is not just beautiful, though Yoshio Taniguchi's building is that and then some. It offers a new way of looking at art, a new way of living with it and a bracing enthusiasm that has not been felt for years. The museum's presence in the city, a city that has been in need of renewal since another of its landmarks fell, has been much vaunted; Midtown Manhattan seems to open out from its expanded sculpture garden, like giant, magical bric-a-brac.

But MoMA has an influence that extends well beyond New York. It was founded with the aim of creating, in the words of its first director, Alfred H Barr, 'the greatest museum of modern art in the world'. It opened, inauspiciously, in rented rooms 10 days after the stock market crash in 1929, but now Barr's vain hope looks more like a well-kept promise.

You walk in from 53rd Street or 54th - the lobby now stretches across an entire city block and is open to the public - and find yourself in an atrium 110 feet tall. Right there, in the middle of your shortcut to work, is a huge Miró and, on the other side, the rainbow stripes of an Ellsworth Kelly. One wall is made of glass and leads out into the sculpture garden. In front of it stands Rodin's Balzac, a statue made to live outside, so that there is a wonderful feeling of transparency and porousness: Balzac might be inside or out; it's merely an invitation to look and look beyond it.

Upstairs, on a massive mezzanine, is a marvellous mishmash of periods and styles: Monet's Water Lilies, a de Kooning, a Brice Marden and, rising from the middle, Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk, an inverted needle in heavy metal, balanced on the tip of a triangle. Towering yet fragile, and seemingly impossible, Broken Obelisk sets, along with its unexpected companions, a bold agenda: it's a symbol of iconoclasm at the core of a new art-world order. Floor by floor, a museum that was once criticised for being too didactic has transformed itself into a master of open-ended suggestion. John Elderfield, chief curator of painting and sculpture, explains that he sought to 'take iconic pictures away from their iconic status, to make new work seem familiar, and old work a little strange again, as it was when it was made'.

He has done so with great care, through galleries designed to open out into each other, offering accidental vistas, sideways glances, shifting shapes - a semblance of serendipity.

In a room devoted to Surrealism, there is a vitrine filled with objects - two Joseph Cornell boxes, a Hans Bellmer photograph, a collage by André Breton. But foremost among these otherwise cohesive things is a famous self-portrait by Frida Kahlo. At first, you're not sure why it's there, but then you look a little longer and her hair, shorn and strewn all over the floor, seems to mirror the thatch of twigs covering the face of Cornell's boxed-up doll.

Behind that seep ideas about femininity - Frida is wearing a man's suit, Bellmer's subject is one of his trademark disarticulated sex dolls. And somewhere in there, too, is a fondness for found objects - Kahlo's, though painted, is made to look like the kind of folk-art ex-votos she collected and pasted all over her walls.

As you're looking at the Kahlo in the vitrine, you see, in a gallery beyond it, a mural painting by her husband, Diego Rivera. Rivera is in a gallery of social realists, but from some angles, or even merely subliminally, the lovers are side by side. There is another husband-and-wife echo downstairs. Jackson Pollock is one of the few artists to have a gallery to himself, but that doesn't mean he's isolated. On a wall in a gallery behind his is a painting by Lee Krasner - their works are displayed as if looking at each other from afar.

In a room full of Abstract Expressionists, you'll find a newly acquired Sol LeWitt sculpture next to a Bridget Riley, an Ad Reinhardt and an Agnes Martin. So far, so straightforward. But walk past the LeWitt on your way through another room and you'll see that part of it is hollow. If you look through one end of it, you find the black fragment of a Joseph Beuys, several sections away. Look through the other end - a glimpse of a white Marcel Broodthaers.

John Elderfield says he had a hard time convincing everyone, including himself, of his choices. For every work in the museum, a mock-up was made and put in place. Colour photocopies stood for paintings, and cardboard models were made of each sculpture, including the Brobdingnagian obelisk. But the result is a triumph and the ultimate overarching sense is of a place that can embrace the monumental while remaining perfectly casual. Matisse's dancers, which would have been trumped-up in another museum, are decorating the stairwell here; on the top floor, near the shop, is Francis Bacon's magnificent triptych; there are three beautiful Medardo Rosso's by the lift and a Damien Hirst outside the loo. But nothing is thrown away; it's all important, as if to say this is life and art comes with it.

In the basement is a different kind of museum. Mark Dion's project, Rescue Archeology, involved excavating the sculpture garden and adjoining sites before construction was underway. He found fragments of many moments in the museum's history and beyond: cornices from John D Rockefeller's 19th-century townhouse, matchboxes from an old hotel, the remains of 1940s constructions by Marcel Breuer and Buckminster Fuller, traces of a Bruce Nauman from the 1970s. In a cabinet of muckraked curiosities, he has exhibited some of his findings: buttons, doorbells, bits of porcelain, children's marbles; new taxonomies of discarded razor blades and rusty screws. On six salvaged mantelpieces are a series of fond displays: photos of the old buildings in silver frames (as if they were family members), a pile of doorknobs, a bunch of test tubes full of dust, as if the sametenor of affection extended to it all.

Dion's project echoes the museum's enterprise as a whole: what are museums for? Are they exercises in nostalgia or can they be furnaces for the future? Who establishes the hierarchy and how many stories are there to be told? On celebrating the institution's 75th anniversary this month, Glenn Lowry, MoMA's director, describes the new hang as 'a series of hypotheses, provisional ways of thinking about art'. He emphasises the temporary qualities of the arrangements, as if they now had the confidence to think ardently about change and possibility.

MoMA was designed, in the words of its founders, to be 'frankly devoted to the works of artists who most truly reflect the tendencies of the day'. But in more recent years, it has been decidedly uncontemporary and taken as its main role that of giving a historical account of predominantly 20th-century art.

Now, a substantial part of what's on show are recent acquisitions. They've built their first gallery for works on film and video and have, for the first time, a dedicated space for contemporary art - a majestic floor full of breathtaking objects - by Matthew Barney, Rachel Whiteread, Kiki Smith, Cy Twombly, Richard Serra, Lorna Simpson. Even with the new 640,000 square feet, only about 10 per cent of the museum's collection can be shown at any one time and some of the displays will be rotated every nine months. The galleries are, in John Elderfield's description, less like instructions and more like debates. MoMa is a series of near-miraculous unfoldings, a place that feels like a maze but turns out to be a map: a way of looking at art anew.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

[Kris]

Yoshio Taniguchi: Nine Museums (http://www.arcspace.com/exhibitions/yoshio_9museums/yoshio_9museums.html)

Beauty in Garbage: Naka Incineration Plant by Yoshio Taniguchi (http://www.archnewsnow.com/features/Feature152.htm)

[ZippyTheChimp]

http://www.archpaper.com/index.html

Found In Translation

One big idea—and thousands of small decisions—are behind any architectural project. For the Museum of Modern Art, reopening this week, Kohn Pedersen Fox was responsible for translating Yoshio Taniguchi’s minimalist concept into a buildable construction. Here’s a sampling of technical solutions that are integral to the museum’s new image and experience.

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The new MoMA orients visitors’ views of the garden courtyard along its length. The interior is a volumetric puzzle of rectilinear compositions, floating planes, and interlocking spaces.


When Yoshio Taniguchi won the commission to expand and renovate the Museum of Modern Art, he had every intention of moving his operation from Tokyo to New York for the duration of the project. Aware of the difficulty of navigating the straits of New York City construction, the museum proposed he partner with a firm with experience building locally. His response? “If you insist on a collaboration, I want to work with a design firm, not just a firm that stamps drawings,” paraphrased architect Stephen Rustow of Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF), which the MoMA ultimately hired as executive architect of the $425 million project. The architect-of-record arrangement was also a new experience for KPF. “But the prestige of the project was hard to resist,” said Rustow who, with Tom Holzman, led the project. “Also, it gave us a chance to engage seriously with a cultural institution.” The firm had wanted to break from its stereotype as a tall building specialist. Rustow, who had worked at I. M. Pei’s office and supervised the construction of the Louvre expansion, was hired by KPF expressly to manage the MoMA job. For five years, an architect from Taniguchi’s atelier worked in KPF’s New York office while eight of KPF’s employees relocated to Japan. The collaboration proved to be a necessity because of the continual shifts and refinements of the building’s programming, which required the design to undergo constant fine-tuning. “There were strong preliminary notions about where the primary collections would be located, but things were changing up until two months ago,” said Rustow. (KPF was also called upon to oversee the renovation of the original 1939 building by Phillip Goodwin and Edward Durrel Stone and the Philip Johnson addition of 1964. The job entailed the complete replacement of the 53rd Street facade and the renovation of several interior spaces.) The more important issue, however, was how to translate Taniguchi’s design intent within American engineering and construction standards. While plenty of articles will no doubt assess the architects’ overall accomplishment, we felt the nitty-gritty problem-solving was worth highlighting, too.

cathy lang ho and anne guiney

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wall, uninterrupted

With the walls in the museum’s atrium space four stories high at certain points, the question of its surface material became a major issue. At one point, Taniguchi considered metal panels, but this raised the problem of a pattern across its surface that would be distracting as a backdrop for freestanding or hanging art. Plaster made obvious sense because, in theory, it is limitless. However, industry standards in the U.S. require an expansion joint every 30 feet to prevent cracking. The resulting grid would be just as bad, not to mention contrary to Taniguchi’s general minimalist aesthetic. So KPF used curtain wall construction to make the wall structurally independent of the intermediate floor slabs, and tied only to the existing columns, which are 26 feet apart on center. While the way the curtain wall ties into the existing structure varies slightly from point to point as specific conditions require, here’s the basic pattern: The wall is comprised of 14-gauge steel with lateral cross-bracing. Six-by-six-inch steel angles tie the frame to the museum’s concrete slabs for lateral support. (One benefit of 14-gauge steel studs is they can be put up by plaster workers; heavier gauge studs require steel workers, which would have complicated an already tight schedule.) Over this steel framework is a layer of 3/4” plywood, which acts as a membrane and makes it easier to hang art since screws have something to bite into. One or two layers of sheetrock (depending on fire-rating) is attached to the plywood, then finished with a plaster skim coat.


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“Missing” Columns

The second-floor gallery in the addition—the David and Peggy Rockefeller Building, which extends MoMA through the block, from 53rd to 54th Street—is the largest and tallest display space in the expanded institution. The 15,000-square- foot and 21-foot-high space is programmed to tell the continually unfolding story of modern art, and thus required the utmost flexibility. Unfortunately, the grand space was interrupted by two chunky columns—beefed up in order to support the new office tower sited above the gallery. (One of the mandates of the redesign was to bring all of the MoMA’s staff, which had been scattered in five locations, under one roof.)
To improve the efficiency of distributing electricity and water within the building—the first five floors of galleries and seven floors of offices above—the designers had already decided to split the mechanical system. Half of the system was put in the basement, servicing the lower floors of the building, while the other half is on the eighth floor, servicing the floors immediately above and below it. The tower had to be
rigidified to support the upper-floor mechanical system. While walking through the construction site one day, consultant structural engineer Guy Nordenson remarked to Rustow,
“With all the steel in the trusses on the eighth floor, we could probably suspend all the floors below it.” At this point, the steel columns on the 2nd floor were already in place.
When the architects brought the idea to museum director Glenn Lowry, he asked, “Are you serious? What would it entail?” Just a little bit more steel on the eighth floor for added strength. Once in place, the construction crew torched away the steel columns they had put there months before, clearing the way, to the curators’ delight, for an impressively expansive, uninterrupted gallery.

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Sharp Reveals

All of the new gallery walls have a 1-inch reveal where the wall meets the floor, but on close inspection, the line is a particularly sharp one. Rather than use the typical J-bead along the bottom of the gypsum board, KPF designed a custom Z-profile channel made out of extruded aluminum. The Z-channel is a good example of a solution born from the conflict between Japanese and American construction materials and standards. It is fairly common in Japan for contractors to create a reveal by cutting the edge of a piece of wallboard (different from our drywall) at 90 degrees, then edging it with a thin metal sheet. Taniguchi wanted to refine the standard reveal by slicing the edge at 45 degrees, creating a sharp point. To accomplish this, KPF designed an extruded aluminum channel that could hold two layers of 3/4“ material—here, wallboard and plywood. Resembling the letter Z, the channel has a tiny round hole inside its point. The hole accepts a small alignment pin to ensure that each piece of channel is correctly in place. After calculating that they would need a staggering amount of channel—several miles—it began to seem pretty reasonable to specify a custom piece and absorb the cost of making the die. Pittcon Architectural Metals, the company that manufactured the channel, was so pleased with the results that it is now carrying the item as a product in its catalogue. Ceilings received a similar reveal treatment—and solution. To float the ceilings, another extrusion was made, allowing ceilings to float away from walls. The floor and ceiling reveals are more than just aesthetic, however. They are an integral part of the museum’s ventilation system. The internal gallery walls are a bit thicker than normal, and that is because they have a plenum inside. Air is drawn up into the system through the reveal at the base of the floor, conditioned, and ultimately released through a series of thin slits at the ceiling.

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Thin Is Beautiful

While leading a group of journalists through a hard-hat tour of the MoMA a year ago, chief curator of the Department of Architecture and Design Terence Riley was keen to point out the little details that made such big difference in the realization of the project. One example was the way the HVAC ducts and other systems were threaded through holes cut through horizontal eyebeams in the glazed west wing that reorients the museum’s entrance toward the sculpture garden. “It was a way to keep the floor slabs thin,” Riley explained, appreciative of how the gesture improves the view of the building from the garden. It was also a practical way to align the floors of the new building with those of the old. “Ceiling heights were lower in old buildings,” said Rustow. “Keeping the floor plates thin in the addition allowed us to maximize the ceiling heights.” The tip of the canopy is tapered, continuing efforts to keep the elevation’s appearance minimal. The third floor slab stops just short of the edge of the building, with a thin steel rod that reaches out to offer added stability to the curtain wall. As for the curtain wall, KPF continued Taniguchi’s overriding formal aesthetic—minimum joints, minimum support, maximum spans of materials and distances—with a structure of extremely thin mullions (see detail, above right) made of milled steel. The result is a slender and stiff steel lattice that is both structure and support for the glazing, which architects were able to specify as large as they could get it (14 feet tall, 7 feet wide). The depth of the horizontal mullions was determined in order to give added strength to the wall, enabling it to bear maximum wind load.



HORIZONTAL SECTION
OF CURTAIN WALL DETAIL
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Gross square footage: 630,000 sf (total renovated and new) Total construction cost: $315,000,000

Architect: Taniguchi Associates—Yoshio Taniguchi, principal; Brian Aamoth, project architect; Peter Hahn, project manager; Keiji Ogawa, Taichi Tomuro, Junko Imamura, team. Executive architect: Kohn Pedersen Fox & Associates—Gregory Clement, managing principal; Thomas Holzmann, senior associate principal, project direction; Stephen Rustow, senior associate principal, project direction; George Hauner, associate principal, job captain; Brian Girard, associate principal, public spaces; Greg Weithman, associate principal, galleries, garden; Robert Hartwig, senior associate principal, office interiors; Claudia Cusumano, Betty Fisher, Erin Flynn, Stephen Frankel, Ethan Kushner, Scott Loikits, Hui-Min Low, Daniel Treinen, team.

Associate architects: Cooper, Robertson and Partners, programming; Alspector Anderson Architects, conservation laboratories.

Engineers: Sevrud Associates, structure; Guy Nordenson and Associates, structure; Altieri Sebor Wieber, mechanical.

Consultants: Zion Breen and Richardson and Associates, landscape; George Sexton Associates, lighting; R. H. Heintges Architects, facades.

General contractor: AMEC




Copyright © 2004 The Architect's Newspaper, LLC

[Kris]

... In MoMA's Big, New, Elegantly Understated Home

A 110-foot-high atrium is the most dramatic and debated feature.

BY ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Wednesday, December 8, 2004 12:01 a.m.

NEW YORK--My relationship with New York's Museum of Modern Art began in the 1940s, in the intimacy of the original 1939 Goodwin and Stone building. A student-friendly 25-cent admission made it headquarters for young New Yorkers drawn to its exciting modernist message. It was the cool place to be. We dated beneath the undulating cheesehole canopy of the roof terrace restaurant, and my first job was in the Department of Architecture and Design, with Philip Johnson as boss and Alfred H. Barr Jr., the museum's founding director, as mentor; you don't get any luckier than that. We preached truth, reason, the gospel of art in our time, and the rational beauty of everyday things.

I do not believe in nostalgia; that was then, and this is now. Even modernism moves on. Today's visitors cluster around van Gogh's "Starry Night" in the same way tourists flock to the Louvre's "Mona Lisa." MoMA--the acronym known all over the world--expanded incrementally until a perennial shortage of space led to an invited international competition for a comprehensive solution. The proposal submitted by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi was selected in 1997.

Which brings us to the new MoMA 65 years after it began its march down West 53rd Street: a suavely sophisticated, exquisitely executed, elegantly understated building that doubles the museum's size. Mr. Taniguchi's style--where less is so much more than trendy minimalism, with every carefully reasoned detail honed as close to perfection as possible--is the right architecture for the Modern. It is also the right building for New York.

The design is driven by the rationality of its plan and its response to its surroundings, essential factors that have taken a back seat to today's obsession with drop-dead forms. It makes sense of the museum's ad hoc development by unifying old and new elements into a harmonious, smoothly functioning whole. The reconfigured complex employs an uncompromisingly contemporary vocabulary, a lesson to those who confuse nostalgia with compatibility. This is genuine contextualism.

Giving MoMA Back

Mr. Taniguchi's architecture celebrates the city rather than itself. It embraces heart-stopping views through glass walls that court immateriality with the precision and delicacy of their framing and the thinness of the floor plates. The new lobby runs from 53rd to 54th Streets as an open, through-block passage. New Yorkers have always been very possessive of the Modern, unlike their formal relationship with the more offputting, magisterial Met; these gestures have given MoMA back to them, and to the city, in a very public way.

Two new structures flank the garden: the building that is now the heart of the museum, with the entrance, galleries and offices and a huge central atrium, and a smaller addition for educational activities. The nearly block-long, 53rd Street frontage incorporates the rebuilt façades of the Goodwin and Stone building and a later one by Philip Johnson, skillfully maintaining the lower, side-street scale. This reconstruction is a symbolic act of homage rather than preservation, since the originals are gone. The architect has obliged sentiment further with a copy of the legendary stair to the second floor galleries, now a ghostly connector between the new second and third floors.

The income-producing tower of Cesar Pelli's earlier renovation, which the museum did its best to pretend wasn't there, has been brought down to the ground to take its proper part in the urban composition. Philip Johnson's immensely popular garden, restored, is entered from the new building so the long lines of pools and paths are seen end-on instead of facing one as serene horizontals; that view is now reserved for the restaurant terrace.

Saved From Oppression

The vastly enlarged institution is saved from oppressive monumentality by its simplicity, lightness, and the elegance and ingenuity of its technological detailing, which has been innovatively engineered in collaboration with the New York firm of Kohn Pederson Fox Associates and structural engineering firms Guy Nordenson Associates and Severud Associates.

The most dramatic and debated feature is the building's 110-foot-high atrium, a soaring central space that starts one floor above the entrance lobby and is ringed with exhibition galleries that give us more of the permanent collection than we have ever experienced, including a treasury of drawings, photographs and prints.

The displays around the atrium can be seen from the garden, where a glass wall that flirts with invisibility projects impeccable proportions and a subdued palette of black granite, aluminum panels, and white and gray glass, its transparency sparked by the museum's classic red 1946 Cisitalia automobile inside. The atrium is so vast that the figures seen across it, in stairways and at railings, are minuscule, and the view from top to bottom, vertiginous or not, depending on your susceptibility, is of miniatures in motion.

Circulation and the handling of crowds seem to be the point of this design as much as its visual drama. Vast numbers of visitors have already proved that it works. But the art in the atrium is upstaged by the continuous motion and diminished by the scalelessness of the immense walls. Paintings are flattened to postage stamps or posters, barely relevant to the passing activity. Woe to the poor "Waterlilies" -- Monet's masterpiece, deprived of the quiet isolation and intimate serenity that it needs, is wallpaper. Circulation trumps everything.

Longing for More Daylight

In the galleries, circulation displaces contemplation. With openings in three walls out of four in almost every room for a relentlessly revolving path, Rothkos and Matisses are cornered beside doorways; there is always something else insistently entering your peripheral vision. This arrangement may present a broader, more inclusive view of modernism as it is currently understood (that, too, will change), but it is more disruptive than helpful, with artists seeming fragmented or lost in the cross references. Exterior glass walls are covered for hanging space and light protection, but one longs for more of the transparency and daylight the architecture could provide to relieve a sense of monolithic uniformity. What is missing is the quiet place where one can communicate directly and deeply with a single work or artist. At the new MoMA there is no repose.

Buildings accommodate needs and provide opportunities; they do not transform institutions. This is an updated MoMA, not a reinvented MoMA, if that ever was necessary. What Mr. Taniguchi has done is to apply the skills evident in his many beautiful museums in Japan to a distinctly American phenomenon -- the modern megamuseum as cultural icon, social center, status symbol, tourist attraction, art mall and high-end shopping opportunity, and what some still consider its primary purpose, the art experience as spiritual retreat.

The new MoMA is a model of modernism and urban sensibility and a showcase for a magnificent collection of 20th-century art. The building is true to MoMA's philosophy, which has always been highly selective and strongly aesthetic no matter how radical its thesis, a process that is a careful validation rather than a bold gamble or risky prophecy. The museum is forever a product of its brilliant beginnings. No one has surpassed or replaced Alfred Barr's founding vision, lucid prose and impeccable eye. If his modern art history was overly neat, it had room for the revisionism that has since enriched it. Neatness counted at MoMA, and it still does.

But we yearn for more than a cloakroom and gift shop in the cavernous entrance; the atrium cries for the really big gesture -- even Barnett Newman's "Broken Obelisk" becomes a decorous gesture that ceases to alarm. This requires a powerful, perception-altering work, a site-specific creation that deals fearlessly with the scale -- something new, provocative and outrageous -- a naughty newcomer that must wait to be judged worthy enough to be invited in. MoMA has never looked so uptight as in this stupendous new space. Something needs to turn that void into a connection between past and future, something that takes a chance on the transformational experience only art can provide. MegaMoMA is fail-safe and risk-free.

Ms. Huxtable is the Journal's architecture critic. Her biography of Frank Lloyd Wright was published last month.

www.opinionjournal.com

[Edward]

Inside MoMA.

http://www.wirednewyork.com/museums/moma/moma1.jpg (http://www.wirednewyork.com/museums/moma/)



http://www.wirednewyork.com/museums/moma/moma2.jpg (http://www.wirednewyork.com/museums/moma/)



http://www.wirednewyork.com/museums/moma/moma3.jpg (http://www.wirednewyork.com/museums/moma/)

[Kris]

The Rebirth of the Modern

by ARTHUR C. DANTO

[from the January 31, 2005 issue]

The letterhead of Columbia University, where I taught for four decades, reads in full "Columbia University in the City of New York," not because there is much likelihood that anyone will wonder which Columbia University the letter comes from but because its location is part of its identity. I have always felt the same thing should be true of the Museum of Modern Art and the City of New York, since they together embody the spirit of modernity. "The Modern," as those of my generation referred to the museum, exemplified modernity through the late Art Deco style of the original 1939 Goodwin and Stone building. As a piece of architecture, it mirrored those parts of the collection that were moderne in the strictest aesthetic sense: as heady, clear and swanky as a gin martini. Its emblematic work, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, with its jazzy art nègre figures--like African fetishes in the salon of a Parisian couturier--had found the museum and the metropolis to which it really belonged. Nothing like this could be said for the 1984 reconstruction by Cesar Pelli, which was modern not in terms of style but only in being of its moment, and which expressed MoMA's uncertainty about its artistic direction. It was, moreover, a defensive piece of architecture, which closed itself off from the city, drawing walls around its collection, as if to preserve Modernism's embattled purity. Only its bookstore windows opened onto the city. When Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik installed their vilified exhibition "High & Low" in 1990, it was barely noticed that they had uncovered one of the windows that had been walled up, enabling passers-by to see the art that Claes Oldenberg had shown in the display window of his "Store" on East 2nd Street in 1962. Those inside the exhibit could see the street life of the city--taxis, trucks, dog-walkers, people pushing strollers--and for a brief moment the barrier between the art and the city all but vanished.

What immediately strikes a visitor to the 2004 museum, designed by Yoshio Taniguchi to coincide with the seventy-fifth anniversary of MoMA, is the way in which the museum is now literally open to the city. The lobby is, in a qualified sense, a pedestrian passage, which one can freely enter and exit; and the upper galleries allow views of New York to enter through generously proportioned windows, as well as the glass-curtain wall facing east. It is as if New York were, as the engine of modernity, acknowledged as an integral part of what the museum exists to show. But one is made conscious of art even if one merely traverses the lobby from one cross street to the other. Upon entering the walkway from 54th Street, one sees Barnett Newman's great sculpture Broken Obelisk, designed as a memorial to Martin Luther King Jr., standing on the second floor of the immense atrium and rising to a skylight four floors up. Ordinarily, one encounters this deeply moving work standing on the same level. Seen from below, the inverted shaft of the obelisk seems to descend to earth like a stalactite--or to point downward like a stylized index finger--rather than rising upward from the point on which it is balanced. The shaft thus acquires an astounding weightlessness, as if it were floating in air.

The people standing around Broken Obelisk are dwarfed both by it and by the engulfing space. The disproportion between the sculpture and the human throng reminded me of a device employed by Piranesi in his engravings of ancient Rome. Seeking to bestow the ruins with even more grandeur than they possessed, he reduced the scale of the human figures that stood about them. This is the effect of seeing Broken Obelisk together with its viewers. And yet, paradoxically, one does not feel diminished but rather exalted by the space when one ascends into the atrium and becomes a part of it. When Jean-Paul Sartre visited New York City in the mid-1940s, he was overwhelmed by the feeling of great space, which reminded him of the American West. Taniguchi has somehow brought that spatial feeling into the museum, as part of the project of integrating the building with the city.

Thanks to its location in Taniguchi's design, Newman's sculpture stands poised to become one of MoMA's emblematic works--a bit ironic in view of his well-known put-down of sculpture as something you bump into when backing up to get a better look at a painting. Another emblematic sculpture is Rodin's looming figure of Balzac, familiar to most of those who have seen it as an outdoor sculpture, either in the Sculpture Garden of MoMA or in the center of Boulevard Raspail, just before it intersects Boulevard Montparnasse in Paris. Balzac has been brought indoors, where it faces the entryway to the collections, with its back to the Sculpture Garden, seen through the glass wall behind it. One of The Nation's critics, Elizabeth Robin Pennell, reviewed this work for the magazine in 1898, when it was, as she archly put it, "a standing joke in Paris." Today we are blind to Modernism's scandalousness, and I admire Pennell for not writing it off, though she was uncertain how it could be considered a finished work. A talisman of Modernism's struggle for acceptance, Balzac is just the right work to mark the beginning of one's visit. Aesthetically, the burnished bronze looks radiant in the natural light of day and luminous at night. Posted at the base of the grand staircase to the collection whose spirit it encapsulates, Balzac is to the new MoMA what the Nike of Samothrace is to the Louvre: a symbol of the triumphant history the museum itself enshrines.

Mounting Taniguchi's staircase, one is conscious of the helicopter, suspended above one's head like a menacing mobile, not only proclaiming the museum's interest in modern industrial design but making a punning reference to the Calder mobile that used to hang above the Bauhaus staircase in the Goodwin and Stone building. In fact, Taniguchi has re-created the brilliant black-trimmed Bauhaus staircase, now between the second and third floors. There indeed is a Calder mobile, as well as a Mondrian painting, both of which, together with the staircase, evoke the Modernist aesthetic of the original museum. The wonderful Oskar Schlemmer painting of Bauhaus students on the stairway--which used to hang where the Mondrian is now--has regrettably been transferred to one of the galleries on the fourth floor, deprived of its earlier meaning. There is one other referential staircase, between the fourth and fifth floors, both of which are given over to painting and sculpture. It alludes to the staircase of the Shchuchin mansion in Moscow, on the landing of which Matisse's La Danse once hung. Shchuchin was one of Matisse's early patrons, and his collection one of the few sites where Russian avant-garde artists could study the kind of modern art that they aspired to create. Each of the staircases in the new building, functional and evocative, thus reflects the aesthetic and historical intentions of MoMA at their best, when architecture and art act as one in imparting Modernism's lessons. The escalators, which dominated the Pelli building's lobby, have been discreetly set to one side.

One also sees La Danse through an opening high in the atrium wall. Indeed, there are balcony-like openings at each level onto the atrium floor, through each of which one sees across to La Danse, with more and more of the gallery stairway revealed the higher you ascend. The museum is a cat's cradle of crossing sight-lines, so one keeps seeing what I think of as the defining works from various angles. When one stands on the level with the helicopter, one can see Balzac below. And of course from one opening onto the atrium, one can see across to the others, as well as people looking over the barriers. As with the view from the lobby into the atrium, other viewers are always part of the scene, which gives the place a tremendous sense of animation. I have never been in a building with so optical an essence, and in which other people by their very presence contribute to its aesthetic impact. In most museums I think of Sartre's famous line from No Exit: "Hell is other people." In MoMA, the consciousness of others moving from stage to stage and space to space is so much a part of the experience that one feels one is always part of a constantly changing work of art. That too makes it feel like New York.

The atrium is clearly the spiritual core of the building, and its floor a kind of piazza, with Broken Obelisk destined to become a meeting point, the way Picasso's Guernica used to be. But what works for monumental sculpture works less well for the paintings, however large they are. The fact that one is always aware of people on every level somewhat reduces the unequal struggle in scale between the immense height of the atrium's walls and the paintings hung at viewing height from the atrium's floor. It was a huge mistake to hang Monet's Nympheas in this space. Even though Monet lived and painted into the 1920s, even though the great paintings of his lily pond, with clouds and their reflections interacting with the floating flowers, influenced--or at least had some affinity in their all-over composition with--Abstract Expressionism, the painting is out of place as well as out of scale. Monet's water-lily paintings were designed for a circular, relatively low-ceilinged room in the Orangerie, as a kind of diorama; and though any one of them is a great treasure, treasures have to be treasured, and not abused. I am sure the wall display is temporary, but space must be found for this work that is consistent with the mission of aesthetic education that La Danse serves, and in which the work can yield a meaning without losing a fight with scale. None of the paintings currently on view there really stand up to the pressure the atrium exerts, even if they fare better than the Monet. Brice Marden's calligraphy and Jasper Johns's Untitled look drab and drained by all that space and light, and Willem de Kooning's Pirate, for all its bright hues, is outmatched by the architecture. Even worse, they become reduced to rectangular patches when seen from the upper openings.

The theory, as I understand it, is that the high ceilings of the museum's second floor were dictated by the anticipated scale of the contemporary work the museum expects to acquire, as it copes with the future of modern art. But very little now displayed, either in the atrium or the side galleries, justifies the height of the spaces. In one of the side galleries off the atrium, there is a marvelous work by the late Felix Gonzales-Torres, called Perfect Lovers. It consists of two quite ordinary kitchen clocks, set at the same hour and keeping the same time. One of them will finally stop--will metaphorically die--before the other. Contemporary work like Gonzales-Torres's is capable of dealing with the greatest of themes--love and death--without requiring immense space. Perfect Lovers, a physically small work, is exhibited in a space designed for something as imposing as one or more of Richard Serra's Torqued Ellipse series.

It is extremely chancy, moreover, to anticipate the future of art architecturally, or to presuppose that modern art will continue to be shaped principally by painting and sculpture, albeit on a larger scale. Performance, installation and video don't necessarily call for the kinds of spaces required bythe classical Modernism so successfully displayed on MoMA's fourth and fifth floors. This is even more true of computer art, which is almost certain to play a significant role in the future. An artist I admire, for the moment without a gallery, makes his work on a laptop, which he recently carried with him to the Art Basel fair in Miami to show to potential collectors. The high ceilings on the second floor boldly project a future that may never come to pass.

The artistic core of the new MoMA consists of the galleries on the fourth and especially the fifth floor, which display the works everyone missed while the museum was undergoing reconstruction: Starry Night, Sleeping Gypsy, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, La Danse, White on White and the many others that define Modernist sensibility. The openings I attended were like family reunions-- everyone was moved by these familiar and deeply loved pieces, and the meaning of MoMA for New York was palpable in the joy expressed in seeing them again. When I revisited the museum as part of the throng, I was impressed that clusters of people gathered spontaneously in front of certain early Modernist favorites, as they do in front of the Mona Lisa or The Raft of the Medusa. This did not quite happen on the fourth floor, where the art still raises the questions that Modernism always raised, even if everyone knows them. Warhol, Johns, Twombly and Rauschenberg have entered the canon, and from college courses in "Art Since 1945," everyone is familiar with the late Modernist movements--Abstract Expressionism, Pop and Minimalism. Of course, this art can be seen everywhere now, but its presence at MoMA means that it has become part of a canonical history and taken its place in a narrative of Modernism. Modern art goes on being made, of course, but the story of Modernism as a period has come to an end.

What has not yet come to an end (or so it would seem) is the idea of a canon, so central to the histories of Modernism and MoMA under Alfred Barr and William Rubin. When Barr purchased one of de Kooning's "Black" paintings in 1948, the message was not only that de Kooning had entered the canon but that the canon had been opened up to American art. Until this acquisition Barr, who personified MoMA, tended to identify Modernism with European art, with rare exceptions like Calder. De Kooning, a Dutch-born American, broke the ice. Even Pollock, whose art Barr at first disliked, was accepted into the canon and now has a gallery to himself on the fourth floor, an entryway to which frames one of Newman's largest paintings, Vir Heroicus Sublimus. The South African artist William Kentridge told me that one of the high points of his career was seeing his prints displayed at MoMA with those of the German Expressionists who inspired him. Being in MoMA has really meant something to artists sensitive to their place in history, and one can see why the museum would want to give its authoritative vision of Modernism's narrative an architectural embodiment. But as that vision of art history loses some of its authority, younger artists may no longer feel anointed when their work is acquired by MoMA. If this is true, the galleries devoted to contemporary art would no longer carry the meaning of the upper galleries. The concept of a canon may itself be dated as an art historical reality.

Meanwhile, the light and amplitude of the museum's first five floors establish an aura for the modern art that has made it into its privileged precincts. For whatever reason, Taniguchi's vision deserted him in creating the sixth floor, which is to house temporary exhibitions. The space is wide, low and graceless, and one appreciates by its absence how important to the overall feeling of the museum the atrium is. The glass-curtain wall is blocked by the elevator bank, so one appreciates that it does more than flood our consciousness with the surrounding city. There is some compensation for the space's soullessness in the fact that the panels of James Rosenquist's gigantesque F-111 can be displayed all on the same wall, the way one now realizes must have been the work's original intention. (Usually it is bent into angles to fit spaces too small for it.) The sixth-floor gallery perhaps communicates the feeling that what will be shown is really not part of what Hegel would call the idea of the modern embodied in the grand architecture below. The five and a half stars it merits make the building well worth a visit in anyone's architectural Michelin. There are not enough stars in the critic's firmament for the art. That is one more thing the Museum of Modern Art has in common with the City of New York.

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050131&s=danto

[krulltime]

(MOMA)

By STEVE CUOZZO
January 18, 2005


The reopened Museum of Modern Art has expanded galleries, restaurants — and its own 16-story boutique office tower.

MoMA uses most of the space at 25 W. 53rd St. itself. But it is marketing 37,400 square feet on floors 12 through 16, and just signed its first tenants: insurer Lloyd's (5,000 square feet) and investment firm Protege Partners (9,350 feet).

MoMA was repped by CB Richard Ellis' Susan Kahaner, Roy Appel, Megan Sheehan, Greg Sundel and Mary Ann Tighe; Lloyds by CBRE's Matthew McBride; and Protege by USI's Robert Emden, Stephen Gordon and David Emden.

Kahaner said the asking rent is $64


Copyright 2005 NYP Holdings, Inc.

[krulltime]

I went to see the MoMa on saturday... Amazing building!!! This is going to take the museum farther of their expectations.... It is going to be visited and enjoy for many decades to come. I will go back as many times as I can.

[Edward]

Inside MoMA.

http://www.wirednewyork.com/museums/moma/moma_levels.jpg (http://www.wirednewyork.com/museums/moma/)

[Kris]

February 4, 2005

CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK

Where MoMA Has Lost Its Edge

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

http://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/2005/02/03/arts/moma.583.1.jpg
A model of Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye is featured in the Modern's architecture galleries.

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A view of the newly installed design galleries on the third floor of the expanded Museum of Modern Art.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/dropcap/p.gifHILIP JOHNSON died last week without ever having seen Yoshio Taniguchi's completed expansion of the Museum of Modern Art. Confined to his Connecticut estate, he was too frail to travel to the museum's opening event and had stopped offering ideas to the Modern's curators.

But the architect's presence still haunts the museum. Whatever you thought of Johnson's aesthetic agenda or impish charm, he never lacked a strong point of view. And it is hard to imagine that Johnson, the founding director of the Modern's department of architecture and design, would have been much impressed by the reinstallation of the department's main galleries more than 60 years after he organized its inaugural show in the museum's old Fifth Avenue home.

Under his guidance, the department's early exhibitions on architecture and industrial design not only marked significant shifts in architectural thought, but also made the museum the nation's most powerful platform for changing the way Americans viewed design. That role continued through the 1960's and the museum's publication of Robert Venturi's "Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture," the first sign that cracks were appearing in the Modernist narrative.

The new installation, by comparison, is unlikely to burn a hole in our memories. Nor is it likely to shake up our view of the world. Tucked away on the third floor of Mr. Taniguchi's elegant monument to classical Modernism, it is a surprisingly lifeless mix of design objects, often-superb drawings and architectural models. The bulk of the installation feels haphazard and lackluster; when it strives for a little originality, it stumbles.

Even more deflating is the general sense of complacency. Whether because of a loss of imagination or the distraction of a high-profile $858 million building project, the department was already losing momentum before the museum closed for renovation five years ago. The reopening of the architecture and design galleries was an opportunity to reclaim, even trumpet, the museum's role in shaping the conversation about architecture. Instead, the department has limited itself to passively documenting current architectural trends.

The biggest disappointment is the south gallery, which focuses on the museum's collection of architectural drawings and models. A scaled-down version of the Modern's "Envisioning Architecture" show, which first traveled to Frankfurt in 2003, it includes a handful of well-known masterworks by early Modernists like Erich Mendelsohn, Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier - including the famous charcoal and graphite drawing of Mies's soaring 1921 Friedrichstrasse skyscraper proposal in Berlin, which looks as fresh today as any of the drawings in the collection.

From there, the show skips along most of the fashionable architectural movements of the ensuing decades, putting particular emphasis on the theoretical works of the 1960's and 70's, like Ron Herron's 1966 "Walking City," which evokes a gigantic mechanized beast, and Superstudio's 1969 Continuous Monument project, an infinite building of mirrored glass.

That sequence is punctuated by designs from the profession's current big guns, including a stunning painting of the dynamic, splintered forms of the Peak, an unbuilt 1983 design for a country club in Hong Kong by Zaha Hadid of London.

Over all, the drawings are first rate, but the point is lost. The layout rarely veers from a mainstream view of architectural history, or serves up the kind of surprises that might have breathed life into the show. You get the impression that the curators were more intent on being inclusive than on telling a compelling story.

In its unapologetic worship of machines, a 1992 airbrush and ink drawing by Neil Denari of Los Angeles, for example, seems almost a reactionary echo of 1960's fantasies by Archigram, but the installation never nods to that. Instead, the drawing hangs near a small sketch by Frank Gehry and another by Greg Lynn, one of the profession's most promising young talents. The drawings have no meaningful relationship to each other that I could discern, other than the fact that all three architects are based in Los Angeles.

The few unexpected moments, on the other hand, are a bit baffling. It's hard to imagine what two large watercolor, graphite and ink drawings by Lauretta Vinciarelli are doing there. The compositions, layers of luminous orange and brown planes, seem out of place and fail to measure up to the other work. And they hint at a conversation between art and architecture that is never really explored. (By contrast, check out the second-floor contemporary art galleries, where a series of drawings for Rem Koolhaas's "Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture," a theoretical work from 1972, and a 1973 film of a performance piece by Joan Jonas capture that era's distrust of an older generation's visions of utopia.)

The design galleries are not much better, although there's a treat or two: to get there, for example, you cross a narrow bridge past the sprightly buglike form of the 1945 Bell-47D1 helicopter, one of the most beloved objects in the old Modern. And a lovely narrow space with an enormous window overlooking the sculpture garden gives you the sensation that you are floating in Midtown Manhattan. That space is dominated by the luscious red enamel body of the Modern's 1943 Cisitalia 202 GT sports car; nearby is the recently acquired flip-panel departure board from the Milan airport and a sensuously curved titanium-edged airplane blade by General Electric.

These objects, all masterpieces of industrial design, support a vision that could have been conjured by an old hard-core Modernist but updated for the computer age. Deftly arranged, these works have just enough room to breathe; you see them with a clarity that is sharpened by their context, just as you would expect in a thoughtful museum exhibit.

But the moment doesn't last. The rest of the design galleries are so cluttered with trinkets that they soon become exhausting. A cluster of objects - among them Fernando and Humberto Campana's 1993 knotted red-cord armchair, Shiro Kuramata's transparent 1988 acrylic chair, a rubber wet suit and a plastic wastepaper basket - are planted on an oval plastic display platform in the middle of a room. There's more: a Swatch watch, a 1992 Ingo Maurer lamp with goose feather wings, an Apple keyboard, a robotic dog, and classics like a Marcel Breuer chair, a 1950's Charles and Ray Eames storage unit and an inflatable armchair from the 1960's.

The feel is that of a high-end furniture and design showroom like the MoMA Design Store itself across the street, where many of these objects are for sale. Taking its cue from the retail world, the objects in the installation are tightly packed together, as if the aim was to offer consumers a wealth of choices rather than draw them into an atmosphere of contemplation. It's as if you have entered a storehouse for the irredeemably trendy.

It's hardly surprising. To cater to status-conscious consumers, stores like MoMA Design, Vitra or Moss have long designed their showrooms to resemble museum spaces. Blurring the boundaries between art and commerce helps justify a high price tag. Unfortunately, it has also had the effect of giving museum exhibitions the feel of shop displays. (Although Moss and Vitra allow you to browse without paying a $20 admission.)

If the gallery installations are flawed, however, they are also a symptom of a deeper problem at the Modern: its lack of leadership. Under Terence Riley, the department created a number of memorable shows in the 1990's, among them important retrospectives of the works of the New York-based Bernard Tschumi and the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, and the "Un-Private House" show.

Since then, the department seems to have settled into inertia. It produced an exhaustively researched retrospective of Mies's Berlin works in 2001 and the more recent "Tall Buildings" show at MoMA QNS. But neither show generated the energy of Mr. Riley's earlier efforts or focused on the corners of the profession where new ideas tend to flourish. With the exception of its current self-serving exhibition of Mr. Taniguchi's museum designs, for example, the department has not organized a major show on the work of a rising talent since the Koolhaas show in 1994.

Worse, that torpor has coincided with a decline in the quality of architectural exhibitions in general. The popularity of high-end architecture and design has led to a boom in second-rate shows organized by curators with little scholarly background or critical detachment. Even at serious museums, such exhibitions are often sloppy and superficial. Typical is the recent "Glamour" show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art - a checklist of vintage clothes and postwar and contemporary architectural landmarks that could have been more intelligently thrown together by the editors of Vogue.

It would be impossible today, of course, to recapture the sense of mission that fueled the old Modern. And why would we try? Johnson was born into a world that still believed in the notion of revolutionary progress, aesthetic or otherwise. It was that faith that spurred him to promote everything from the International Style to Postmodernism with the zeal of a true believer. Architecture, thankfully, no longer has a dominant center - the age of dogmas and manifestos is gone.

Even so, Johnson's best shows always managed to convey a sense of urgency. The Modern has lost that sense of purpose. Surely curators know that "good taste" is not enough to give coherence to an all-important installation, let alone to turn an audience on. The museum needs to find a bolder mission than defining who or what constitutes the mainstream.

Copyright 2005 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[Archit_K]

Yoshio Taniguchi
Architect

Born in 1937 in Tokyo, Taniguchi graduated from Keio University with a degree in mechanical engineering. He then earned a master's degree in architecture from Harvard University. After working in the office of Kenzo Tange he established his own practice. Over the past 20 years he has designed museums, libraries, schools, a hotel, an aquarium, teahouses, and gardens. He has taught at Harvard, UCLA, and the University of Tokyo. His goal for MoMA was "to create an ideal environment for art and people through the imaginative and disciplined use of light, materials, and space."

[Edward]

MoMA's sculpture garden.

http://www.wirednewyork.com/museums/moma/moma_sculpture_garden.jpg (http://www.wirednewyork.com/museums/moma/)


Inside MoMA.

http://www.wirednewyork.com/museums/moma/moma_shadows.jpg (http://www.wirednewyork.com/museums/moma/)

[RedFerrari360f1]

That first picture is amazing!

[Alonzo-ny]

Can you walk directly into the courtyard from the street? This is one of the first buildings Im going to check out when I come back to new york! June 4th cant wait!

[RedFerrari360f1]

No I dont think you can, its a sculpture garden with valuable sculptures and thus direct easy access is not available, you need to pay admission and go through the building to get to it.

[lofter1]

A Mission for MoMA

http://www.nysun.com/edition/620_large.jpg
Heuichul Kim
Andy Warhol’s wallpaper decorates the interior of MoMa’s new Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building.
The 63,000 square-foot facility opens next week.

nysun.com (http://www.nysun.com/article/43918)
BY KATE TAYLOR
November 21, 2006
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Museums

The Museum of Modern Art's new Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building –– an eight-story facility that includes classrooms, libraries, a theater, and two screening rooms –– is more than just another museum expansion. The building, which officially opens next week, is a physical expression of how museums see themselves in the 21st century: their sense of social responsibility and the emphasis they place on building their audiences through educational classes and activities.

The new building, which wraps around the museum's sculpture garden, to the east of the galleries, is the last part of the architect Yoshio Taniguchi's design to be completed. Its first three, public floors include classrooms, a theater, and a welcome area. The upper floors comprise the research areas –– libraries for all of the departments, as well as the museum's substantial archives –– which are open to researchers by appointment.

Tonight, as part of a weeklong celebration of the building's opening, a round-table discussion on how to engage visitors with art will be held in the new building's Celeste Bartos Theater. The speakers are the Harvard education guru Howard Gardner, the art historian James Elkins, and the deputy director of the Dallas Museum of Art, Bonnie Pitman. (Tickets are free but limited, so arrive early.)

Although MoMA's education and research programs are not new, the building is a tangible symbol of the museum's dedication to them.

"If you go to almost any other museum, education is in the basement or invisible," MoMa's deputy director for education, Wendy Woon, said. "To have created such an exquisite building, that is so welcoming in its scale and its amazing facilities, is really a testament to the museum's commitment to education."

Another longtime trustee, June Larkin, provided the initial encouragement to build an expanded educational facility as part of the museum's new physical plant, according to MoMA's director, Glenn Lowry. (Ms. Larkin's family name, Noble, was on the education center in the old MoMA and remains in the new building.) "She was urging us to think big and to try to do something innovative," Mr. Lowry said.

It was Mr. Taniguchi who proposed putting the educational and research facilities in a separate building, Mr. Lowry said. Impressed by his ambitious design, the Cullmans, who support several programs around the city related to education, stepped forward to support it. (The museum would not disclose the amount of their gift, nor the budget for the building. The overall budget for the construction of the new museum was $425 million.)

MoMA's education program includes academic courses for adults, including survey courses on modern art, with a focus on MoMA's collection, as well as specialized courses in topics such as abstract art and contemporary Chinese art. Ten-week courses cost $500 ($425 for members). In addition, there are free programs for families and visitors with special needs: deaf or hard-ofhearing adults, individuals with learning or developmental disabilities, and a program for people with Alzheimer's disease. There are also classes for teenagers, students, and teachers.

Education has taken a more prominent role in museums' missions in the last 15 years, Ms. Pitman said. She was the chairwoman of an American Association of Museums task force on education in the early 1990s, which published a report called "Excellence and Equity: Education and the Public Dimension of Museums." Museums around the country followed its advice, incorporating educational goals into their mission statements and seeking funding specifically for educational programs.

"Education departments are extremely powerful in museums now, in part for the kind of funding they can attract," the director of a program in museum studies at New York University, Bruce Altshuler, said. "It's not a venal thing, but it happens to be that often municipal, federal, and state money goes for educational programming."

The former director of education at MoMA (who is now the director of the Brooklyn Historical Society), Deborah Schwartz, said the museum spent the last few years rethinking its education programming. The adult academic courses –– now a popular part of the museum's programming and one with the potential to produce income –– started in January 2005."Within a year we had this huge program that just got bigger and bigger," Ms. Schwartz said. (The fall courses this year were oversubscribed, and the museum is adding another night of classes.)

The education staff also used the test run to figure out the kinds of physical spaces and technology they needed in the new building. ""We were trying to look into the future," Ms. Schwartz said –– for instance, creating seminar rooms where a group of teachers could theoretically carry on a videoconference with a group of teachers in another country, partly live and partly over the Internet.

MoMA's libraries and archives have long been a resource for scholars of the history of modern art. "I did my first book practically living in MoMA's library," Mr. Altshuler said. In the new building, researchers will enjoy both more space and a tranquil, contemplative atmosphere. A sixth-floor reading room accommodates 40 people and has an outdoor terrace overlooking the sculpture garden.

"I wrote to Yoshio Tanuguchi," Mr. Cullman said. "I said, ‘Yoshio, this is absolutely spectacular. But I'm concerned that most of the people will be up on that porch looking at the view, and nobody will do their work!'"

© 2006 The New York Sun, One SL, LLC.

[lofter1]

A New Way to See Art: The Modern, Completed

http://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/2006/11/29/arts/29moma_CA1.600.jpg
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Museum of Modern Art The new Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman education building,
completing the museum’s expansion, opened Tuesday.
Shown is the staircase at the end of the lobby.

nytimes.com (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/29/arts/design/29moma.html?ref=arts)
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
November 29, 2006

Architecture Review

The new Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman education building at the Museum of Modern Art is unlikely to appease those who feel the museum has become a soulless corporate machine. But at least it underscores what is most alluring about the museum’s recent expansion.

A taut composition of floating planes and elegant lines, the education wing has a cool, self-confident air like that of the museum’s 2004 gallery building, which was also designed by Yoshio Taniguchi. Finally, we can experience the museum as a complete urban composition. And while its sleek packaging may alienate those who consider it evidence of the institution’s aloofness, it reaffirms that Mr. Taniguchi is adept at designing complex spaces, often with real seductive power.

The eight-story building, which opened yesterday, anchors the eastern end of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. Its main facade there, a towering glass wall capped by a soaring steel canopy, mirrors the facade of the David and Peggy Rockefeller Building across the garden to the west, creating a monumental frame for the activity below, like the prosceniums of twin stages. But it is the audience that is on display. Seen from the street or the garden, the museum presents a continuous pattern of activity, reaffirming its public mission.

This is what we expect from Mr. Taniguchi: refined architectural abstractions that are so tightly composed they can seem on the verge of snapping. And in general, he delivers here. Inside the entrance to the education wing, a broad staircase descends to a lower-level lobby to the right, interposing an unexpected void between the visitor and the garden just beyond.

The marble floor of the garden projects several feet over the void, creating the illusion that it is floating on a thin horizontal plane. A second-floor mezzanine cantilevers above this space, as if the building’s intersecting planes are on the verge of drifting off into space.

That sense of weightlessness is reinforced by a few carefully positioned works of art, which further blur the distinction between indoor and outdoor spaces. A bright red Ferrari Formula One racing car hangs on the wall above the lower lobby. Hector Guimard’s entrance gate for the Paris metro stands just outside the window, with the swaying branches of the garden’s weeping beech trees as a backdrop. In the distance, the museum’s stacked glass-enclosed galleries resemble a cabinet of toys, with the glistening body of a Jaguar E-type roadster hovering above Rodin’s bronze Balzac.


http://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/2006/11/29/arts/29moma_CA2.650.jpghttp://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/misc/spacer.gifhttp://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/misc/spacer.gifFred R. Conrad/The New York Times
A new meeting room overlooks St. Thomas Episcopal Church.

Such compositional games continue to unfold as you move through the building, with dazzling views of the cityscape opening along the way. A staircase at the back of the lobby draws you up behind the elevator core, then back toward the glass facade before reaching the mezzanine, which has the generic glamour of a rather exquisite airport lounge. Farther up, a meeting room brushes up against the elaborately detailed rear facade of St. Thomas Episcopal Church, a good example of how Mr. Taniguchi manages to weave fragments of the city into his composition.

That effect culminates at the top-floor library, where a long, narrow terrace extends out underneath the building’s steel canopy. Framed by Philip Johnson’s reclad 1964 addition on one side and a new eight-story wall on the other, the library terrace feels soothing — even as the facades of the gallery and education buildings mirror each other, creating a palpable visual tension. The museum becomes a gigantic tableaux vivant, a microcosm of the city as a whole, a world in perpetual motion.

Not everything here is so smoothly executed. The connections between the new wing and the 1964 building made me cringe. On the second floor, the two are joined by a long corridor that switches back to connect to the museum cafe, obstructing the view of the garden below. Mr. Taniguchi tries to solve this by cutting openings through the walls, but they only make the clumsiness more glaring.

Of course, many New Yorkers could care less about such details. They want to know if the continuing reinstallation of the Modern’s collections can breathe new life into the galleries, or if their blandness is a result of something more fundamental in the architecture itself. The museum’s curators have tinkered, adding more lighting, for instance, so that art can be displayed in the stairwells. With the construction project now complete, they will presumably turn their attention to rethinking the museum’s overall mission.

In the meantime, visitors can now experience MoMA in its full sweep.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/11/29/arts/29moma_CA0.450.jpg
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
The Museum of Modern Art’s garden,
with the new building on the left and the
reclad 1964 building by Philip Johnson on the right.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

[lofter1]

MoMA (http://www.wirednewyork.com/museums/moma/) -- looking across the Sculpture Garden to the Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman education building ...

http://www.wirednewyork.com/museums/moma/moma_sculpture_garden.jpg

[krulltime]

MoMA to Gain Exhibition Space by Selling Adjacent Lot for $125 Million


http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/01/03/arts/03muse_CA0.450.jpg
A view of the vacant lot MoMA is selling to Hines,
an international real estate developer based in
Houston.


By CAROL VOGEL
January 3, 2007

Capitalizing on Manhattan’s robust real estate prices, the Museum of Modern Art is selling its last vacant parcel of land in Midtown for $125 million to Hines, an international real estate developer based in Houston, the museum’s director said yesterday.

As part of the deal Hines is to construct a mixed-use building on West 54th Street that will connect to the museum’s second- , fourth- and fifth-floor galleries, said the director, Glenn D. Lowry. He said the project would afford about 50,000 square feet of additional exhibition space for the Modern’s painting and sculpture collections.

A Hines spokesman said it was too early to say what the building’s other uses would be.

The property is one of several the Modern acquired during the last decade in mapping out an ambitious expansion. A glass-and-steel addition designed by the architect Yoshio Taniguchi was completed in November 2004.

Hines also plans to provide about 10,000 square feet in the new building’s basement for museum storage.

After construction expenses for the new galleries are covered, the Modern estimates that some $65 million will go to its $650 million endowment.

“This is a Christmas present,” Mr. Lowry said. “It’s a tremendous boon to enhancing what is already an extraordinary collection.” The 10 percent addition to the endowment will go toward caring for the collections and acquisitions. No firm timetable for construction has been set, he added, but he estimated that completion of the new building was at least five years away.

In 1996 the museum bought the Dorset Hotel, a 19-story building from the 1920s next door on West 54th Street, along with two adjacent brownstones in a $50 million transaction. Much of that land was used for Mr. Taniguchi’s addition. That expansion, including an increase in MoMA’s endowment to cover operating expenses, cost $858 million in total.

The museum also quietly purchased other parcels on West 54th Street, including what had been the City Athletic Club, a brownstone and a sliver building next door.

Over the years, Mr. Lowry said, the museum has been inundated with offers from developers interested in buying the land, but did not seriously consider selling until recently.

“But as the market went into overdrive it seemed like the right move to make,” he said. The Modern put out the word that it was open to offers and the response was overwhelming.

Hines was the highest bidder, Mr. Lowry said. “We ultimately settled on Hines because of its financial offer and because it has a good reputation for working with architects,” Mr. Lowry said. He added that no architect had been selected to design the new building or the Modern’s additional galleries.

When Mr. Tanaguchi conceived his design he took into consideration a possible future expansion to the west, Mr. Lowry said, making it structurally easy to break through to what will be the new building and extend each of the three gallery floors by about 17,000 square feet.

Jerry I. Speyer, a Modern trustee and real estate developer who is president and chief executive of Tishman Speyer, helped negotiate the sale. (He was instrumental in the purchase of the Dorset Hotel, too.)

“The museum is not in the real estate business, but in the business of showing art, collecting art and educating people about art,” Mr. Speyer said. “Because of the figuration of the land, there was a limit to the amount of space we could use for galleries.”

He said that the entire board agreed that now was the time to act. “Everyone felt great about the decision,” he said of the sale. “There were no issues in anyone’s mind.”

The parcel as a whole consists of about 200,000 square feet of buildable space, Mr. Lowry said.

The addition also opens the way for the museum to address wide criticism of the exhibition spaces in the Taniguchi building. When the Modern reopened in 2004 many faulted its curators for showing fewer artworks in its expanded galleries than it had before.

“The goal has always been to display the collection better,” Mr. Lowry said. Responding to the criticism, he said the display of art in the museum’s previous incarnation was “overly dense,” which people felt was “too much like a textbook.”

Trying to anticipate the museum’s needs for contemporary art display is not easy. Mr. Lowry said the new galleries would be designed to be flexible.

“We envision them to include space that will deal with the unanticipated changes of the future,” he said.

And whereas MoMA had to close its doors on West 54th Street during the 2002-04 building project, operating a temporary museum in Queens, Mr. Lowry said that would not be necessary this time.

“The construction of these galleries will not entail closing the museum again,” he said.


http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/01/03/arts/03muse_CA1.650.jpg
An aerial view of the vacant lot MoMA is selling.


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

[jeffpark]

I am a bit surprised that Harry Macklowe, did not buy this property,
because Harry just recently purchased the office building right next door to the west of this site, -1330 avenue of the Americas, known as the “Financial Times Building“ for $498 million which goes from 53rd to 54th Street
and this new Building by Hines/MOMA when complete, will block all the windows at Macklowe's office tower that are facing 5th Avenue which will make the value of Macklowe building at 1330.. worth less then what he just bought it for which was around $1000 a foot.


whats do you think thay will do with the site build an boutique Office Tower, or Hotel
the floor plates will be above 17,000 sf which will be plenty of room for a office tower

[macreator]

200k isn't too much space -- anyone know if the developer could transfer over some air rights from anywhere nearby?

[millertime83]

where will the line queue now?

[stache]

I am a bit surprised that Harry Macklowe, did not buy this property,


It sounds like he wasn't invited to make the purchase, or his bid was too low.

[jeffpark]

It sounds like he wasn't invited to make the purchase, or his bid was too low.

who was the bid done through Darcy, Doug, Ron, ??

[jeffpark]

the NY POST today has an article on it to

"January 3, 2007 -- THE Museum of Modern Art just sold a vacant, paved-over site next to its new building to Chicago-based Hines Interests for $125 million.

The price for the air rights alone, we hear, was $800 a square foot. The museum had bought the air rights from the University Club for about $90 a square foot. The footprint is 17,062 square feet, running from 53rd Street by the American Folk Art Museum to 54th Street next to MoMA. The development can go to 210,238 square feet.
According to a MoMA spokeswoman, the museum will net about $65 million over its costs as it will also own 60,000 square feet in the new Hines building that will primarily be used as gallery space. It is unclear if the very capable Hines will develop the site on its own or partner up. No one at Hines responded to a request for comment".

So according to the NY POST it will be 210,238 sf of which MoMA will take 60,000 sf that leaves the developer/Hines with only 150,000 sf,

just wondering were is the "University Club" which MoMA bought the Air Rights from?

[Edward]

University Club is across the street, corner Fifth Ave and 54th

[londonlawyer]

[COLOR=black][FONT=Verdana]the NY POST today has an article on it to

"January 3, 2007 -- THE Museum of Modern Art just sold a vacant, paved-over site next to its new building to Chicago-based Hines Interests for $125 million.

[B]The price for the air rights alone, we hear, was $800 a square foot. The museum had bought the air rights from the University Club for about $90 a square foot. The footprint is 17,062 square feet, running from 53rd Street by the American Folk Art Museum to 54th Street next to MoMA. The development can go to 210,238 square feet....

Won't this be a tiny building?

[antinimby]

Hines buys vacant lot from MOMA for mixed-use tower


http://www.cityrealty.com/graphics/uploads/1167859495_momahines.gif


03-JAN-07

The Museum of Modern Art announced today it has a contract to sell its vacant lot just to the west of its properties on the block bounded by Fifth Avenue and the Avenue of the Americas and 53rd and 54th Streets to Hines Interests.


The deal requires that Hines Interests, one of the nation's foremost skyscraper developers, provide about 50,000 square feet of exhibition space and about 10,000 square feet of basement storage space for the museum on the lower floors of a mixed-use development on the site.

The museum recently completed a major redevelopment that was designed by Yoshio Taniguchi.

In addition to creating new spaces for the museum to use, the deal is expected to provide it with about $65 million for its endowment.

The parcel, which is now paved and extends through the block between 53rd and 54th Streets, has about 200,000 square feet of developable space.

"The Museum acquired this site over the course of the past decade, realizing that future expansion of the current gallery space would someday be desirable," said MoMA Director Glenn D. Lowry. "However, over the past several months it became clear that current real estate market conditions make this an opportune time for the Museum to realize its investment in order to accomplish two important goals: to expand our gallery space and generate revenue to strengthen the Museum's endowment."

The vacant property, comprising a footprint of 17,062 square feet, is bordered by the Museum on 54th Street and the American Museum of Folk Art on 53rd Street.

The museum's announcement said that Hines has not yet established a timeframe for the development, but it will likely take several years and that an architect has not yet been chosen. The announcement did not indicate whether the museum had veto power over the selection of an architect.

There was no indication the new building will house residential or commercial space. The market for apartments, hotel rooms and office space at such a location is extremely good. The museum's low-rise wing on 54th Street has a lushly landscaped roof.

Hines is a privately owned real estate firm involved in real estate investment, development and property management worldwide, with offices in 15 countries on four continents, including New York (since 1982), Chicago, San Francisco, Houston, London, Paris, Milan, Madrid, Sao Paulo, Beijing, and Shanghai.

Copyright © 1994-2007 CITY REALTY.COM INC.

[Citytect]

HINES + NOUVEL = MORE MOMA


Peter Slatin

After a fierce and very hush-hush competition among five world-leading architects, France's Jean Nouvel has been chosen to design a new 60-plus story tower in the heart of Midtown Manhattan. To rise next to – and be joined with - the Museum of Modern Art's sleek, serene and recently expanded home on West 54th Street, the new building will contain 75,000 square feet of additional exhibition space for the museum. Sources say it will also contain speculative office space and – bien sur – luxury condominiums.

The developer is Houston-based Hines Interests in partnership with Whitehall Street, the Goldman Sachs group, which earlier this year won the right to acquire and develop the 17,000-square-foot, block-through parcel. It stands immediately west of MoMA and was previously occupied by the historic City Athletic Club on West 54th Street; the club closed in 2002 and was acquired by the museum out of bankruptcy.

MoMA's press office referred calls to Hines, where a spokeswoman said that it was "too early" to say anything. But sources familiar with the design competition and the project confirmed the selection of Nouvel. Whitehall also declined to comment.

One challenge in going public with the selection may be the fast-changing world of finance. Earlier this year the developers were seeking more than $125 million in debt financing for the project, a figure that sources say could rise by an additional $100-plus million, depending on potential zoning variances for the site. But at the time, even though Manhattan's high-end condo market had begun to rebound from a stall in the last half of 2006, at least one lender balked at the borrowers' willingness to pay more than $750 a buildable, or FAR, square foot for the site.

Another issue that may be delaying an announcement: whether the new MoMA galleries – which will not have their own entrance but will simply be extensions of the existing galleries, will be designed by Nouvel or by the Yoshio Taniguchi, the Japanese architect of who designed MoMA's renovation and expansion, which opened in 2005. Sources say that it's most likely that it will be Taniguchi who designs the new exhibit halls, which will occupy the first six floors of the building.

There is also the question of the direct involvement of Nouvel himself; the architect has been known to be less than conspicuous at some of his projects, and no doubt Hines wants to be sure that it gets Nouvel when it hires Nouvel.

MoMA has been pressed to add new space ever since the renovation opened, following complaints from many quarters that the new galleries were lacking in grace and space and had lost some important qualities following the museum's reopening.

The new building is the 62-year-old Nouvel's third, largest and most central Manhattan commission. His first New York building, 40 Mercer Street in SoHo, which was also developed by Hines and Whitehal, along with developer Andre Balasz, is nearly complete. A second, 20-story building is in development by Alf Naman and Cape Advisors at Eleventh Avenue and 19th Street, across from Frank O. Gehry's (and Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg's) luminescent InterActive Center, opened earlier this year.

Nouvel has been selected over submissions by Diller Scofidio + Renfro; Morphosis; Reiser and Umamoto; and Nicholas Grimshaw & Partners. Any one of these architects would doubtless have added something striking to the city's skyline, which is quickly developing nodes of exciting new residential architecture. Tribeca has Philip Johnson's Urban Glass House and a small building by Winka Dubbeldam; Chelsea has the burgeoning, adventurous High Line corridor anchored by the IAC; and Midtown has 53rd and 54th Streets, where more commercial offerings include Norman Foster's anticipated Shangri-La Hotel and condos for RFR Holdings just a few blocks east of MoMA on 53rd Street. And there is of course Cesar Pelli's original Museum Tower, partly behind and even adjacent to the new tower site, on West 53rd Street.

Still, the path from a star architect's selection to a built project will be a tricky one for Hines and for MoMA and its brand new chair, Jerry Speyer. There are complex air rights questions including transfers from historic properties nearby; one package has already been assembled by MoMA and is being transferred to Hines along with the site. However, further air rights are yet to be nailed down and delivered, and the ability to do so will certainly affect the outcome of the deal, its size, and its price.

Then, of course, there is the market, which Hines can only hope will show the same durability and value as MoMA's core collection of modern masters.

TheSlatinReport (http://www.theslatinreport.com/story.jsp?StoryName=0619moma.txt)

[pianoman11686]

Holy crap, this is incredible news! I was just walking by this lot the other day and wondering if anything would ever get built there, but never would I have expected a 60-story office tower, by Nouvel no less!

[londonlawyer]

Holy crap, this is incredible news! I was just walking by this lot the other day and wondering if anything would ever get built there, but never would I have expected a 60-story office tower, by Nouvel no less!

I agree! Awesome!!

[sfenn1117]

Very exciting news!

[antinimby]

Next to MoMA, Reaching for the Stars


http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/11/15/arts/moma190.jpg
A rendering of the Jean Nouvel-
designed tower to be built adjacent
to the Museum of Modern Art.


By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
Published: November 15, 2007 (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/15/arts/design/15arch.html)


Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building, William Van Alen’s Chrysler Building, Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building.

If New Yorkers once saw their skyline as the great citadel of capitalism, who could blame them? We had the best toys of all.

But for the last few decades or so, that honor has shifted to places like Singapore, Beijing and Dubai, while Manhattan settled for the predictable.

Perhaps that’s about to change.

A new 75-story tower designed by the architect Jean Nouvel for a site next to the Museum of Modern Art in Midtown promises to be the most exhilarating addition to the skyline in a generation. Its faceted exterior, tapering to a series of crystalline peaks, suggests an atavistic preoccupation with celestial heights. It brings to mind John Ruskin’s praise for the irrationality of Gothic architecture: “It not only dared, but delighted in, the infringement of every servile principle.”

Commissioned by Hines, an international real estate developer, the tower will house a hotel, luxury apartments and three floors that will be used by MoMA to expand its exhibition space. The melding of cultural and commercial worlds offers further proof, if any were needed, that Mr. Nouvel is a master at balancing conflicting urban forces.

Yet the building raises a question: How did a profit-driven developer become more adventurous architecturally than MoMA, which has tended to make cautious choices in recent years?

Like many of Manhattan’s major architectural accomplishments, the tower is the result of a Byzantine real estate deal. Although MoMA completed an $858 million expansion three years ago, it sold the Midtown lot to Hines for $125 million earlier this year as part of an elaborate plan to grow still further.

Hines would benefit from the museum’s prestige; MoMA would get roughly 40,000 square feet of additional gallery space in the new tower, which will connect to its second-, fourth- and fifth-floor galleries just to the east. The $125 million would go toward its endowment.

To its credit the Modern pressed for a talented architect, insisting on veto power over the selection. Still, the sale seems shortsighted on the museum’s part. A 17,000-square-foot vacant lot next door to a renowned institution and tourist draw in Midtown is a rarity. And who knows what expansion needs MoMA may have in the distant future?

By contrast the developer seems remarkably astute. Hines asked Mr. Nouvel to come up with two possible designs for the site. A decade ago anyone who was about to invest hundreds of millions on a building would inevitably have chosen the more conservative of the two. But times have changed.
Architecture is a form of marketing now, and Hines made the bolder choice.

Set on a narrow lot where the old City Athletic Club and some brownstones once stood, the soaring tower is rooted in the mythology of New York, in particular the work of Hugh Ferriss, whose dark, haunting renderings of an imaginary Manhattan helped define its dreamlike image as the early-20th-century metropolis.

But if Ferriss’s designs were expressionistic, Mr. Nouvel’s contorted forms are driven by their own peculiar logic. By pushing the structural frame to the exterior, for example, he was able to create big open floor plates for the museum’s second-, fourth- and fifth-floor galleries. The tower’s form slopes back on one side to yield views past the residential Museum Tower; its northeast corner is cut away to conform to zoning regulations.

The irregular structural pattern is intended to bear the strains of the tower’s contortions. Mr. Nouvel echoes the pattern of crisscrossing beams on the building’s facade, giving the skin a taut, muscular look. A secondary system of mullions housing the ventilation system adds richness to the facade.

Mr. Nouvel anchors these soaring forms in Manhattan bedrock. The restaurant and lounge are submerged one level below ground, with the top sheathed entirely in glass so that pedestrians can peer downward into the belly of the building. A bridge on one side of the lobby links the 53rd and 54th Street entrances. Big concrete columns crisscross the spaces, their tilted forms rooting the structure deep into the ground.

As you ascend through the building, the floor plates shrink in size, which should give the upper stories an increasingly precarious feel. The top-floor apartment is arranged around such a massive elevator core that its inhabitants will feel pressed up against the glass exterior walls. (Mr. Nouvel compared the apartment to the pied-à-terre at the top of the Eiffel Tower from which Gustave Eiffel used to survey his handiwork below.)

The building’s brash forms are a sly commentary on the rationalist geometries of Edward Durell Stone and Philip L. Goodwin’s 1939 building for the Museum of Modern Art and Yoshio Taniguchi’s 2004 addition. Like many contemporary architects Mr. Nouvel sees the modern grid as confining and dogmatic. His tower’s contorted forms are a scream for freedom.

And what of the Modern? For some, the appearance of yet another luxury tower stamped with the museum’s imprimatur will induce wincing. But the more immediate issue is how it will affect the organization of the Modern’s vast collections.

The museum is only now beginning to come to grips with the strengths and weaknesses of Mr. Taniguchi’s addition. Many feel that the arrangement of the fourth- and fifth-floor galleries housing the permanent collection is confusing, and that the double-height second-floor galleries for contemporary art are too unwieldy. The architecture galleries, by comparison, are small and inflexible. There is no room for the medium-size exhibitions that were a staple of the architecture and design department in its heyday.

The additional gallery space is a chance for MoMA to rethink many of these spaces, by reordering the sequence of its permanent collection, for example, or considering how it might resituate the contemporary galleries in the new tower and gain more space for architecture shows in the old.

But to embark on such an ambitious undertaking the museum would first have to acknowledge that its Taniguchi-designed complex has posed new challenges. In short, it would have to embrace a fearlessness that it hasn’t shown in decades.

MoMA would do well to take a cue from Ruskin, who wrote that great art, whether expressed in “words, colors or stones, does not say the same thing over and over again.”


http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/11/15/arts/191.jpg
The interior of Jean Nouvel’s
building, which is to include a hotel
and luxury apartments.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

[ramvid01]

:eek::eek::eek: Wow that is beautiful. So we are getting a mini Hancock tower with a wavy design. Oh I hope this one gets built immediatly!!!:D

Thanks for the article AN.

[antinimby]

Not only is it just perfectly beautiful but it is tall, too (well at least for NY anyway).

I haven't stopped smiling since I saw this about half an hour ago. :D

[NoyokA]

Now thats what I'm mofka talking about. One of the best proposals in NYC history. Please dear god don't let them water this baby down.

[sfenn1117]

WOW

I'm speechless. Get this on the fast track PLEASE.

[NoyokA]

Isn't it kind of ironicly sad that the developer proposing one of the most exciting projects for New York City in decades is from Houston.

[investordude]

Can't argue with this one. I wonder why they decided to do condos instead of office - with the market cooling it seems like office is the safer bet.

[212]

With this one, Nouvel becomes a Great NYC Architect !

He's 3 for 3 so far. Many more, please ...

[ASchwarz]

Fantastic! Nouvel has done it again!

He has at least four other major projects I can think of in Manhattan. We are in for a treat!

[GVNY]

This atheist begs the Gods to have this constructed! Please!


*I dance for the Gods*

[NewYorkDoc]

Interesting proposal. I'm eager to see more renderings.

[Fabrizio]

Everthing new in this area of mid-town, everything on and near 5th should be of this quality and it should be law.

( I don't know how you'd ever go about mandating that... but that's they way it should be.)

[krulltime]

wow 75 floors of that beauty! YAY!

[Scraperfannyc]

No complaints about this one. This is a good booster for midtown construction, especially after seeing Macklowe ruin a section of Midtown very close to this site.

They need to build this one before it is too late.

[ablarc]

Everthing new in this area of mid-town, everything on and near 5th should be of this quality and it should be law.

( I don't know how you'd ever go about mandating that... but that's they way it should be.)
A laudable goal near-impossible to implement.

You can't do it prescriptively by writing pre-existing criteria. These always end up stupidly counterproductive, because creativity inherently consists of breaking the rules.

You could have committees of eminent and qualified citizens pass judgment on fully realized designs submitted to them. You'd get decisions of about the quality and integrity of the ones that emanate from the Landmarks Commission at this time: not very high (but perhaps better than nothing).

[investordude]

Once again, we see market based solutions beat legal solutions. Did you even read the article? "How did a for profit company produce a better design than a musuem." Then it goes on to explain it must be because the museum forced Hines to produce a cool building - what a crock! Hines realizes, for its own reasons, that building a piece of modern art for at lovers to live in, adjacent to Moma, will be profitable. So, they produce great buildings because of capitalism, which is the right mechanism to regulate this. Get the government out of the way of men of vision rather than try to suggest it can do a better job.

And I don't agree that every building should be a soaring architectural masterpiece - New York should retain the diversity that only capitalism will truly provide.

[ablarc]

Did you even read the article?

Did you even read the post?

[Tectonic]

I'm a big fan of cross bracing, but I'm not getting my hopes up till I see steel.:)

[TonyO]

This looks great. Maybe this will push Gehry to release his designs of the Beekman st. tower.

[JacobNYC]

Its great how everyone on this forum jumps on the bandwagon for accolades. I don't see what the big deal is with this proposal.

[NYguy]

This looks great. Maybe this will push Gehry to release his designs of the Beekman st. tower.

Fat chance. Gehry will only go back and tinker more now that this design has come out. With Calatrava's tower on hold (or dead), Gehry's tower should have long been in the spotlight. But it remains hidden somewhere in his mind. When the design is finally revealed, it won't have the same impact.

[NYguy]

NY Times

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/11/15/arts/1115-web-MOMA.jpg__http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/88978789/original.jpg


I don't know what the timetable is for this one, but I'm already excited...

http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/88981897/large.jpg

[212]

The tower will be a beacon for the museum -- visible from all over the city.

[londonlawyer]

This MAGNIFICENT tower should be a lesson for cheap fools like Macklowe, Solow and Zuckerman as to how development should properly occur!

[stache]

It will certainly be an improvement over that ho hum residential tower of theirs directly to the west.

[NYguy]

It will have a roof height more than twice that of its future neighbor:


http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/11/15/arts/1115-web-MOMA.jpg__http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/84983439/medium.jpg

[GVNY]

Extraordinary.

[ramvid01]

Wow, so this tower will be around the same height as the Chrysler Building. Even better.:eek::D

[RandySavage]

I echo everyone's sentiments that this is spectacularly good news... if it comes about intact. I gather from the article that the crown will be covered in the same glass skin as the rest of the building (it looks that way in the right rendering, but left only shows steel).

And from a skyline perspective, a much-needed breaking of the upper midtown plateau.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Its great how everyone on this forum jumps on the bandwagon for accolades. I don't see what the big deal is with this proposal.You mean like here.

[Alonzo-ny]

WOW, I mean WOW! A modern tower that spectacularly rises from base to crown beautifully! This could be the best NY tower since the Chrysler itself!!

[NYatKNIGHT]

YES to all the above, it's fantastic. Please let this become reality. A artful tower complimenting its MoMA neighbor with its own galleries. Brilliant. And a perfect peak for that part of the skyline.

[MidtownGuy]

This is so wonderful to see, a design that is such a breath of fresh air!!!
Build, Build, Build!

[dtolman]

How high is this really? It seems to be another 70 story tall building, just with an extra big decorative spire...

still, based off the few images posted with the article, it looks good - definitely better than mediocrity like the BoA tower...

[NoyokA]

Now that I've seen the latest image I love this project even more, every inch of this baby is tall. The somewhat tortured arrangment of the cross-bracings adds to this, its simply scrambling in its haste to be tall. A perfect analogy for New York.

[NoyokA]

How high is this really? It seems to be another 70 story tall building, just with an extra big decorative spire...

still, based off the few images posted with the article, it looks good - definitely better than mediocrity like the BoA tower...

The Museum Tower is 588 feet, the model shows this building more than double that height. The Financial Times Building right next to it is 496 feet.

[NoyokA]

A laudable goal near-impossible to implement.

You can't do it prescriptively by writing pre-existing criteria. These always end up stupidly counterproductive, because creativity inherently consists of breaking the rules.

You could have committees of eminent and qualified citizens pass judgment on fully realized designs submitted to them. You'd get decisions of about the quality and integrity of the ones that emanate from the Landmarks Commission at this time: not very high (but perhaps better than nothing).

Not really. Many cities have architectural review boards.

[NewYorkDoc]

What is the thing on top?

[ablarc]

Not really. Many cities have architectural review boards.
Oh heck, I know that. The hard part of it is getting anything remotely resembling an intelligent decision out of them if you're planning something the least bit unusual. And if it's innovation you're looking for ... well, that's unusual by definition.

I'd much rather submit designs to folks at Wired New York than the review boards I've dealt with, which too often enforce banality.

[ablarc]

I had some reservations till I saw the latest image, but now I think Nouvel's design is very impressive indeed. Bravo!

[dtolman]

The Museum Tower is 588 feet, the model shows this building more than double that height. The Financial Times Building right next to it is 496 feet.

I'm a little dubious of the scale in the model - it can't be more than double the height if its as tall as the chrysler builiding; the comparison to chrysler means that its total height is ~1100' - and it appears the decorative spire is about a 6th of its total height.

So I'm _guessing_ that the top floor is at 8-900', and the spire is another 200-250'.

[Alonzo-ny]

Id say the model with context is more accurate. The sillouette with the chrysler may have been created by the newspaper and not the architects, whereas the model certainly was.

[Alonzo-ny]

My quick scaling against my screen according to the building immediately next to it as a 500' reference it is around 1300' approx

[TREPYE]

My god.....FINALLY the east side of midtown NYC gets something beautiful!
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/11/15/arts/1115-web-MOMA.jpg__http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/88978789/original.jpg
What a beautiful and daring shape, the facade intricate and detailed with structural cues. And my goodness is that a decorative spire on top?

Looks too good to be true.....
Which begs the question- what are the steps beween now and groundbreaking for this exac design (no water downs - PLEASE)? Too much could go wrong and I dont want to let get disappointed later on.

[londonlawyer]

Does anyone know how Hines is permitted to build something so tall? I would not have thought that that tiny lot would have air rights for such a tall tower (though I'm glad it does!).

[dtolman]

I like it from this angle!!!

http://mms.businesswire.com/bwapps/mediaserver/ViewMedia?mgid=116937&vid=5 (http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/index.jsp?epi-content=PUBLIC_IMAGE_VIEW&newsId=20071115006113&newsLang=en&contentItemId=1722290)

The press release (http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/November2007/15/c8829.html) (nothing here I didn't see in the ny times article).

[Dynamicdezzy]

HOLY SH*T..... I'm Impressed.... This is here?!?!?!

[sfenn1117]

So modern but at the same time just screams NYC

[londonlawyer]

Consider that Hines is working with Rosen on Foster's Shangri-La on Lex and with Nouvel on this masterpiece, whereas cheapos Macklowe, Solow and Zuckerman are working with SCLE and SOM! Hines is disgracing these guys!

[investordude]

This building doesn't look like 1300 feet in this better rendering you've provided.

[Alonzo-ny]

Its hard to completely see the crown from that angle, or maybe my calculations were off.

[DougGold]

Thank God for this tower! I was worried that New York was only getting glass boxes from now on. Woo hoo!

[SilentPandaesq]

This building doesn't look like 1300 feet in this better rendering you've provided.

Seeing as in the rendering, the windows go all the way to the visible top, it is likely that at this angle the spire/crown thing is just not visible. Taking the model as gospel, the building continues for some time after the windows. Also, there seams to be some light ghost image at the top of the angled render which might indicate the crown continuing.

[Citytect]

I had some reservations till I saw the latest image, but now I think Nouvel's design is very impressive indeed. Bravo!

ablarc, do you remember calling Novel a no-talent hack? (Musee du Quai Branly). Hopefully you're starting to be convinced otherwise. This building is great. I love that Nouvel delivers such variety in his design work, even if it's not always great.

[econ_tim]

I like the big new rendering. It looks liek something that Spider-man might build!

[NYguy]

http://digital50.com/news/items/BW/2001/07/14/20071115006113/jean-nouvel-design-unveiled-for-hines-project-in-manhattan.html

Jean Nouvel Design Unveiled for Hines Project in Manhattan

NEW YORK-(Business Wire)-November 15, 2007

Hines, the international real estate firm, announced today the formal selection of Paris-based architect Jean Nouvel as the designer of a new building slated for a key parcel in midtown Manhattan, adjacent to The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The preliminary architectural design was also released.

Nouvel's bold design will rise 75 stories from the 17,000-square-foot site between 53rd and 54th streets just west of MoMA. Currently, a mix of uses is contemplated for the building including: a 50,000-square-foot expansion of MoMA's galleries (levels two to five); a 100-room, seven-star hotel and 120 highest-end residential condominiums on the upper floors. The project will likely commence pre-sales in late 2008.

Nouvel's design maximizes the site while considering the city's zoning envelope. The proposed building's unique silhouette tapers as it rises to a distinctive spire. Its steel and glass facade reveals the diagrid structural design.

Gerald D. Hines, chairman of Hines, commented, "Nouvel's exciting concept has the potential to become an international architectural design icon."

The Hines firm has collaborated with Nouvel on both 40 Mercer in New York's SoHo neighborhood and on the C1 Tower currently under development in Paris.

Jean Nouvel has headed his own architectural practice, Ateliers Jean Nouvel, since 1970. His honors include the Gold Medal of the French Academy of Architecture, the Royal Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Aga Khan Prize, honorary fellowships from the American Institute of Architecture, and France's National Grand Prize for Architecture. He was awarded Italy's Borromini Prize and Japan's Praemium Imperial Career Prize as well as the Wolf Prize, the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize in architecture, and the International Highrise Award.

Among Mr. Nouvel's completed buildings are the Arab World Institute, Paris; Lyon Opera House; Cartier Foundation, Paris; Galeries Lafayette department store, Berlin; Lucerne Culture and Congress Center; Tours Conference Center; The Hotel in Lucerne; Andel office building, Prague; Nantes Justice Center; Dentsu Tower, Tokyo; museum of archaeology, Perigueux; and the technology center in Wismar.

Hines has been active in New York City since 1981, having developed six major buildings in midtown, including Philip Johnson's "Lipstick Building" at 885 Third Avenue. In addition to the recently completed 40 Mercer, Hines has three other residential projects underway in New York City including One Jackson Square in Greenwich Village. Hines also acquired three major office buildings in New York since 2003, including I.M. Pei's 499 Park, and currently manages more than 11.5 million square feet of office space in the area. For more information on Hines, please visit www.hines.com.

For information on this new project, please visit www.53W53.com.

________________________

Judging from the comments here, this must be the highest rated design in New York right now.

[kz1000ps]

I love MS Paintbrush! crude yet highly effective..

http://img136.imageshack.us/img136/8634/nyc1panoamazinggi2.jpg

Now please don't anybody go counting floors or the height of this render (I drew it to roughly 1,050 ft). I have no inside info, and all I set out to do with this was get an idea for how it'd look on the skyline.

[SilentPandaesq]

and all I set out to do with this was get an idea for how it'd look on the skyline.

The answer to that question is "Bad A*s"

[NYguy]

The Museum Tower is 588 feet, the model shows this building more than double that height. The Financial Times Building right next to it is 496 feet.

Model with height references...

http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/88996867/original.jpg__http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/84983439/medium.jpg

[MidtownGuy]

Take that, London!:p

[kz1000ps]

Looking at NYGuy's diagram, it looks like the Nouvel will easily hit 1,300 feet! That's some serious height.

[sfenn1117]

Looking at NYGuy's diagram, it looks like the Nouvel will easily hit 1,300 feet! That's some serious height.

I was thinking the same thing, but then compared to the Chrysler building it appears to be the same height. Still, over 1000 feet for sure.

[kz1000ps]

I say ignore the Chrysler silhouette comparison and look to the render of the Nouvel among its neighboring structures and towers. From that we can deduce:

Let's use the building to the west as our ruler. It's 496 feet tall, so let's round it up to an even 500. Looking at the diagonal cross-bracing on the Nouvel's north facade, you can estimate that there are two complete "segments" of it plus the base, which looks to be about half the height of one cross-bracing segment. So figure 2 1/2 segments equals 500 feet, which makes for easy math---- one segment equals 200 feet.

NOW, there are three full segments above the 500 foot mark, plus a crown which is another segment.. that makes for a total of 6 1/2 segments at roughly 200 feet each.

And that's how I arrived at 1,300.

Of course, this rendering could be horribly off, but the Nouvel is perfectly rendered, and the surrounding buildings' massings and heights look accurate, so I think it's safe to trust this one.

[Alonzo-ny]

So around 1300' !!

[ablarc]

ablarc, do you remember calling Novel a no-talent hack? (Musee du Quai Branly).
Yeah, that one I still don't like --though I'll check it out next time I'm in Paris.

Hopefully you're starting to be convinced otherwise.
I guess. How could I not after this one and the other over at the High Line?

This building is great.
Best skyline addition since ESB?

I love that Nouvel delivers such variety in his design work, even if it's not always great.
In that regard, he's the successor to Saarinen.

[JacobNYC]

It is highly unlikely that a 75 story tower with residential floorplates can hit 1300'. Thats more than 17' per level. But then I guess the MoMA exhibit podium could compensate for that. I guess I just corrected myself.

[Eugenius]

Yeah, the view of this thing from Central Park will be amazing.

That is why they were able to pay over $800/sf for the air rights. All of the apartments on the upper floors with 360 degree views will be going for $5000-$6000 per square foot. Shrewd business decision by Hines.

[ramvid01]

It is highly unlikely that a 75 story tower with residential floorplates can hit 1300'. Thats more than 17' per level.

If you look at the previous page there is a shot of the building that shows how high the floors seem to be and they seem to be on average (at least the bottom ones) very high.

[krulltime]

I guess we will loose some of these Central Park views. But at least we are getting something amazing! I can't complaint.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2381/2035870638_dbac869e34_b.jpg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/delski/2035870638/

[Ebola]

This is exactly what NY needed! Another supertall diagird structure building is adding so much to a city that's already on top of them all! The amazing Hearst Tower, 3WTC, SilverCup West, the Sherwood Tower, and now this baby, ALL UTTERLY AMAZING. :cool: Lots of new supertalls for the greatest city.

I feel very sorry for anyone who doesn't like this; they must be very sick in the head.


It's like JHC, but in a different more sleek shape. Gold.

[NYguy]

It's like JHC, but in a different more sleek shape. Gold.

I think this is better.

This resized rendering shows the soaring quality of this tower...

http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/89002860/medium.jpg


http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/89002860/large.jpg


While not the highest, the GE deck will have the best views of any observation deck
in town...

http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/88994536/large.jpg

[Bob]

I am big-time impressed with this proposal. New architecture with guts and style! Thumbs way up.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Does anyone know how Hines is permitted to build something so tall? I would not have thought that that tiny lot would have air rights for such a tall towerAir rights were purchased from surrounding property. The size of the lot doesn't matter as long as you don't go straight up from the property lines.

[antinimby]

^ And thank goodness for that (the straight up part - we don't want that).

Anyway, are there any foreseeable obstacles? Anyone who says "no" will be nominated for prez!

[rmannion]

Amazing! It's going to be fun watching this go up.

[londonlawyer]

Air rights were purchased from surrounding property. The size of the lot doesn't matter as long as you don't go straight up from the property lines.

Thanks. So, is this project as of right and can proceed without a community board giving Hines a hard time?

[antinimby]

Apparently the top will have "multiple peaks" according to this report:

Nouvel to add 'exhilarating' building to Manhattan skyline


By David Usborne in New York
Published: 16 November 2007 (http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article3166413.ece)

Manhattan is set to get an exciting new addition to its skyline after the unveiling yesterday of plans for an ambitious skyscraper by the French architect Jean Nouvel that will rise on a slim empty lot next to the Museum of Modern Art.

Rising 75 storeys like a many-pointed shark's tooth in the midst of the busy Midtown office and hotel district, the new tower will be taller than the Chrysler Building a few blocks away and will compete with anything already standing in New York for its architectural panache and daring.

Destined to house a hotel and luxury residences, the tower will also offer significant new space on three of its lower floors for MoMA, which only recently celebrated a significant expansion with new galleries designed by Japan's Yoshio Taniguchi.

The empty lot, used for occasional outdoor events, was acquired by the museum after the City Athletic Club, which once stood there, went into bankruptcy. The Texas-based developer Hines then bought the lot, but the museum retained veto power on the choice of architect for the new tower.

Nouvel, a superstar of architecture whose competitors for the project included the London-based firm Nicholas Grimshaw and Partners, has only recently started to make his mark on New York.

A compact luxury apartment building in SoHo is almost finished while he has won rave reviews for a bigger residential edifice with a crazed mosaic of windows, each different in shape and size, facing the Hudson river.

After months of secrecy and heated speculation about the site, the selection of Nouvel and the first renderings of his proposed structure were reported by The New York Times yesterday and its widely respected architecture critic, Nicolai Ouroussoff.

He liked what he saw, asserting that the tower promises to be "the most exhilarating addition to the skyline in a generation".

Twisting and tapering to multiple peaks high above the pavement, the building will bare its skeletal superstructure of steel on the exterior of multiple facades of glass. Also visible from the outside will be the lattice-like ventilation system. MoMa intends to punch through to its new expanses inside the tower directly from the second, fourth and fifth floors of its existing, often tourist-choked, galleries next door. No separate entrance will be required.

Manhattan, which for perhaps for too long has relied on long-ago conceived skyscrapers to retain its reputation for skyline grandeur, has burst into life recently with a series of new and daring projects. Construction is at last under way on the mighty Freedom Tower at Ground Zero where several other trophy buildings by architects Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Fuhimiko Maki of Japan are also in the works .

Now the regeneration of Midtown is taking off as well. Competing with Nouvel for attention will be Lord Foster's planned new Shangri-La hotel set to rise just three blocks to the east on Lexington Avenue and the already standing Hearst headquarters with its soaring atrium and striking diagonal grid system of construction also by Foster.

© 2007 Independent News and Media Limited

[TREPYE]

Nice article, but please do not mention the FT along with its 2 immediate neighbors and this in the same breath of praise.

This tower is really the greatest in a few generations; it could potentially be the best since the ESB itself. Fantastic, fantastic tower! ;) The best proposal since Calatrava's cubes, lets pray it doesnt suffer its fate. This is gonna be a tough act for Gerhy to follow. Nouvel has moved up a few noches with this brilliant scillitilating design. Please Hines lets not waste any time and lets start building this masterpiece ASAP.

Sure brings a smile to an NYC architectecture fans face.... :D

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/11/15/arts/1115-web-MOMA.jpg

[NoyokA]

Can somebody please pinch me...


http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/3070/nouvel44ej3.jpg

[antinimby]

Where did cha get that?

[Tectonic]

Having some trouble with that angle, dunno why.

[NoyokA]

Where did cha get that?

Some Dutch website:

http://www.architectenweb.nl/aweb/redactie/redactie_detail.asp?iNID=11062

There are very few locations more deserving of a tall tower than here and very few tall towers in the world better than this. This building will almost single-handedly resolve the midtown plateau, because if one building deserves to rise above the pack this is it. I can’t wait to see this building and what it does for the skyline from Queens, New Jersey, Central Park, this list goes on…

[nysurfdude]

This building is stunning. I couldn’t believe that it was proposed here in NY, im so used to seeing such buildings being proposed in Chicago or abroad. The design is very creative from base to spire, what a beauty! I think this building is truly great because it has the potential to set precedent to a new generation of buildings to raise the bar around here and build with inspiration to better our skyline. It is great building because it augments the effects of a lot of other projects to better this whole generation of new buildings. I was excited when I saw how inspired people were in a hospital elevator when seeing it in the paper! I love how this building is a part of a great museum too, not only symbolizing great architecture but also the vast depth and culture that NYC offers in its museums. Well done!!!

[antinimby]

It seems to have a different look from different angles.

By the way, it's hard to believe they can build something this size from the 200k or so sf they've accummulated that was last reported earlier this year.

Unless of course Hines has bought additional air rights since then.

[lofter1]

... Nouvel's design is very impressive indeed. Bravo!


Nouvel is such the rage that folks are naming babies after him (http://socialitelife.buzznet.com/2006/07/26/shiloh_nouvel_pitt_to_be_made_into_wax_baby.php)!

[NoyokA]

Nouvel has come a long way. His three most recent projects are gems.

His first two, not so much...

http://www.thecityreview.com/giovani9.jpg

http://images.zwire.com/local/Z/Zwire1840/zwire/images/ACF6CB.gif

[justin]

How will the MoMA galleries get through the Folk Art museum?

I'm almost as excited as I am about 80 South St...

justin

[kz1000ps]

It seems to have a different look from different angles.

Yeah, it looks to be an upside-down "T".

**

We are awed by how slender 785 8th Ave is, but this one will proportionally be just as slim from (at least) the north, if not even more so. cRaZY!

[lofter1]

The Folk Art Museum only goes back half-way towards 54th Street ...

The lot for the Nouvel building is an L-shaped plot that bends around the Folk Art Museum and connects with MoMA on the north side of the block.

The MoMA wall that abuts the lot hasa huge doors facing west and is where they loaded the huge Serra metal pieces of his recent show into the Museum. It is through those west-facing walls that the existing MoMA will connect to the new galleries in the Nouvel tower.

Here's a shot of the last building to come down on that lot -- with MoMA to the left (the Folk Art Museum not visible behind) an the Financial Times building to the right ...

Connolly's Won't Go Down (http://www.disappearingplaces.net/connollys-wont-go-down)

Disappearing Places (http://www.disappearingplaces.net/index.php)

http://www.disappearingplaces.net/images/16.jpg

[NewYorkDoc]

Congrats to Stern for making it on Curbed:

Nouvel's MoMA Madness React-o-Matic (http://curbed.com/archives/2007/11/16/nouvels_moma_madness_reactomatic.php)


http://curbed.com/uploads/2007_11_nouvel.jpg

While we were busy wallowing in the trenches of Red Hook, French starchitect Jean Nouvel was busy changing the Midtown skyline forever. His design for a 75-story skyscraper next to the Museum of Modern Art at 53 West 53rd Street was unveiled (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/15/arts/design/15arch.html?_r=2&hp&oref=slogin&oref=slogin) by Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff, and the plans for the massive building call for more MoMA gallery space, a 100-room hotel and 120 luxury apartments. Ouroussoff, already comparing the tower to the Woolworth and Chrysler Buildings, wrote: "Its faceted exterior, tapering to a series of crystalline peaks, suggests an atavistic preoccupation with celestial heights." Got that? So what do others think of the future pied-a-terres for status-seeking foreigners:


1) "It's difficult to believe, but after Jean Nouvel's sensitive-yet-stunning 40 Mercer, his sparkly-yet-stunning 100 Eleventh Avenue, Jean Nouvel comes through with another groundbreaking design for Manhattan." [Tropolism (http://www.tropolism.com/2007/11/nouvel_redefines_towers_in_nyc.php)]


2) "Isn't it kind of ironicly sad that the developer proposing one of the most exciting projects for New York City in decades is from Houston." [Wired New York/Stern (http://wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?p=198370)]


3) "Just another stupid 75 story box. But if it's anywhere near as cool as the Quai Branly, Ourousoff's hyperbolic enthusiasm may well be deserved." [Curbed comments (http://curbed.com/archives/2007/11/15/meanwhile_not_in_red_hook.php)]


4) "damn, that's a fine lattice. it seems to play off the tombasil pretty well." [Archinect/holz.box (http://archinect.com/news/article.php?id=67620_0_24_0_C)]

Unanswered: Is this thing as-of-right, or what?
· Next to MoMA, a Tower Will Reach for the Stars (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/15/arts/design/15arch.html?_r=2&hp&oref=slogin&oref=slogin) [NYT]

[econ_tim]

Oh. My. God.
http://www.dezeen.com/2007/11/16/53-west-53rd-street-by-jean-nouvel/
http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/53-streeth-entrance.jpg
http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/53th-avenue.jpg
http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/entreejn-copie2.jpg
http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/zoom-entrance.jpg
http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/structure-copieversion2-copie.jpg
http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/a1.jpg
http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/54-1.jpg
http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/c.jpg
http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/b.jpg
http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/8-copie.jpg

[econ_tim]

http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/1-copie.jpg
http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/restaurant.jpg
http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/room.jpg
http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/privatroom2.jpg
http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/pool.jpg
http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/insider3.jpg
http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/above-view.jpg

[antinimby]

Oh-my-god is right. Those renderings are absolutely juicy and delicious.

[econ_tim]

lol anti. great minds, eh?

[lofter1]

Hold on to your seats (from dezeen.com (http://www.dezeen.com/2007/11/16/53-west-53rd-street-by-jean-nouvel/) ) ...

53 West 53rd Street by Jean Nouvel

Posted by Rose Etherington
November 16th, 2007

http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/above-view-square.jpg

Architect Jean Nouvel (http://www.jeannouvel.com/) has unveiled his design for a new 75-story tower
on a site next to the Museum of Modern Art (http://www.moma.org/) in New York.

http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/53-streeth-entrance.jpg

The tower at 53rd West 53rd Street (http://www.53w53.com/) will contain a hotel,
luxury apartments and three floors for use by MoMA
to expand its exhibition space.

http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/53th-avenue.jpg

The restaurant and lounge are below ground level, so that pedestrians
can peer in through the exterior, which is entirely sheathed in glass.

http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/entreejn-copie2.jpg

The following text is from developer Hines (http://www.hines.com/home/default.aspx):

JEAN NOUVEL DESIGN UNVEILED FOR HINES PROJECT IN MANHATTAN (NEW YORK)

Hines, the international real estate firm, announced today the formal selection
of Paris-based
architect Jean Nouvel as the designer of a new building slated for a key parcel
in midtown Manhattan, adjacent to The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The preliminary
architectural design was also released.

http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/zoom-entrance.jpg

Nouvel’s bold design will rise 75 stories from the 17,000-square-foot-site
between 53rd and 54th streets just west of MoMA. Currently, a mix of uses
is contemplated for the building including: a 50,000-square-foot expansion
of MoMA’s galleries (levels two to five); a 100-room, seven-star hotel and
120 highest-end residential condominiums on the upper floors. The project
will likely commence pre-sales in late 2008.

http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/structure-copieversion2-copie.jpg

Nouvel’s design maximizes the site while considering the city’s zoning
envelope. The proposed building’s unique silhouette tapers as it rises to
a distinctive spire. Its steel and glass façade reveals the diagrid structural
design.

http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/a1.jpg

Gerald D. Hines, chairman of Hines, commented, “Nouvel’s exciting
concept has the potential to become an international architectural
design icon.”

http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/54-1.jpg

The Hines firm has collaborated with Nouvel on both 40 Mercer in
New York’s SoHo neighborhood and on the C1 Tower currently under
development in Paris.

http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/c.jpg

+++

[lofter1]

Continued (http://www.dezeen.com/2007/11/16/53-west-53rd-street-by-jean-nouvel/) ...

Jean Nouvel has headed his own architectural practice, Ateliers Jean Nouvel,
since 1970. His honors include the Gold Medal of the French Academy of
Architecture, the Royal Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects,
the Aga Khan Prize, honorary fellowships from the American Institute of
Architecture, and France’s National Grand Prize for Architecture. He was
awarded Italy’s Borromini Prize and Japan’s Praemium Imperial Career Prize as
well as the Wolf Prize, the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize in architecture,
and the International Highrise Award.

http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/b.jpg

Among Mr. Nouvel’s completed buildings are the Arab World Institute, Paris;
Lyon Opera House; Cartier Foundation, Paris; Galeries Lafayette department
store, Berlin; Lucerne Culture and Congress Center; Tours Conference Center;
The Hotel in Lucerne; Andel office building, Prague; Nantes Justice Center;
Dentsu Tower, Tokyo; museum of archaeology, Périgueux; the technology
center in Wismar; Agbar office tower, Barcelona; extension to the Queen Sofia
museum, Madrid; Quai Branly Museum, Paris; Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis;
Brembo’s research and development centre; and the Richemont Corporation
headquarters in Geneva.

http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/8-copie.jpg

Hines has been active in New York City since 1981, having developed
six major buildings in midtown, including Philip Johnson’s “Lipstick Building”
at 885 Third Avenue. In addition to the recently completed 40 Mercer,
Hines has three other residential projects underway in New York City
including One Jackson Square in Greenwich Village. Hines also acquired
three major office buildings in New York since 2003, including
I.M. Pei’s 499 Park, and currently manages more than 11.5 million
square feet of office space in the area.

http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/1-copie.jpg

http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/restaurant.jpg

http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/room.jpg

http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/privatroom2.jpg

http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/pool.jpg

http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/insider3.jpg

http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/above-view.jpg

+++

[lofter1]

oops ^ econ_tim an I were on to the same thing :o

But something this fantastic deserves the overkill, eh?

[ablarc]

Just beautiful.

This guy has just propelled himself into the first rank of genius architects. And he did it just as the current reigning heavyweight champ self-destructed.

Nouvel over Gehry by a knockout.






Btw, where's Calatrava?

[Tectonic]

Outside the fact that it's tall, design wise sometimes I like it sometimes I don't. Its sitting on the fence like William Beaver and the Met Life Building.

But hey thats just my thoughts.

By the way, it reminds me of a 21st Century John Hancock.

[antinimby]

lol anti. great minds, eh?Yup. I actually posted them myself but you beat me to it.

Anyway, with these latest renderings, I think I now have a pretty good idea of how the overall shape of the tower is.

[econ_tim]

some high res versions of rendering here: http://www.archiportale.com/progetti/schedaprogetto.asp?idprog=5019&pag=1

the enhanced detail makes the exoskeleton and glass skin look even better

[stache]

Leaving Frank Gehry in the dust!

[lofter1]

Who ^ is sitting in the middle of a big empty hole (http://wirednewyork.com/forum/showpost.php?p=194626&postcount=1518) with NOTHING to show for it.

[Alonzo-ny]

Id love a timetable on this, and an official release of height. The image with central park seems to show it around chrysler height but the models and other calculation show otherwise?

[lofter1]

Nouvel's design is gorgeous ...

Something about those spires that is Gaudi-esque.

The Woolworth was dubbed "The Cathedral of Commerce". This one could become "The Cathedral of Creativity".

+++

[Alonzo-ny]

It shoots your eyes straight up into the sky like a rocket.

[212]

... and it'll be one of NYC's best at street level, too, with that view through glass into the underground museum restaurant.

[czsz]

I'm amazed there was no buildup to this. Unveiled in the NYT? Amazing teh internets were left in the dark so long...

[TallGuy]

I usually don't like unconventional designs but this one is a beauty!

[ablarc]

It shoots your eyes straight up into the sky like a rocket.
Yeah, literally!! It even has that slightly wobbly trajectory as it heads skyward!

Organic and lovely. This building is truly inspired.

(And to think this guy also came up with that obscenity in Barcelona.)

[Jasonik]

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v312/Jasonik/5019_8.jpg

[Optimus Prime]

I'm reminded of the Continental...wowie wow wow wow!

[NoyokA]

And look a sliver with no blank wall! Actually it has a small albeit visually interesting blank wall.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Remarkable. Very Manhattan.

[Fabrizio]

It's very, very right.

http://www.newyorkarchitecture.info/NYAI/Images/Buildings/SaintPatricksCathedral-001.jpg

http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/above-view.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v33/ronaldo/148750.jpg

[kz1000ps]

My favorite aspect of it so far is how it responds to the irregular lot shape. It simply revels in the site's idiosyncracies, and grows out of it in a logical yet highly organic way. Very satisfying.

[Peteynyc1]

Has the site been cleared? Is work underway at all? Is this residential?? Forgive me for not reading the whole thread, no time today.

[krulltime]

Yes, not yet, part residential and part hotel. Oh and museum space.

[MidtownGuy]

I keep breaking from my own work to look at these renderings over and over again. I haven't been this excited by a proposal in years.
Designs of this caliber should be what the supertalls on the West Side aspire too, and if the Penn Hotel is to be destroyed then surly we had better get something suitably stunning in its place.
Oh, and Gehry had better be cooking up something extraordinary for Beekman if he doesn't want to be seriously upstaged.

[Alonzo-ny]

I dont think anyone will notice the beekman now, Ratner really ****ed up by not forcing gehry to finish the design and get out some renders.

[ZippyTheChimp]

and if the Penn Hotel is to be destroyed then surly we had better get something suitably stunning in its place.Sadly, given the current demand-criteria for office space, residential, hotel, and mixed-use is the only opportunity for design of this caliber.

[Alonzo-ny]

Just goes to show what you can do with relatively small amount of square footage. This and the WTC will smash NY into the 21st century.

[arcman210]

for me one of the things that makes this tower superb is how it doesnt achieve its height by an out of place, flagpole or oil rig type spire. its form continues from the ground right up to the top.

[JMGarcia]

Its truly a fantastic design. It manages to be totally modern yet gothic and deco at the same time. The grayish tint to the glass and steel works better with "masonry" New York than most glass towers.

The world of high-rise construction has changed and this just goes to prove it. This level of design can only be achieved in residential/hotel types of uses. The current requirements for office development make this type of cutting edge design impossible. Its the residential world that is moving skyscraper design forward and that is a major historical change IMO.

I'm hoping this goes smoothly through the various approvals it will need. I think Libeskind's and UA's highly publicized designs for the WTC have opened up people's minds to this type of oddly angular design and it won't shock them into a knee-jerk negative reaction to it hopefully. Something like proposed 6 years ago would have been greeted with a chorus of reastionary booos I'm sure.

[kz1000ps]

The current requirements for office development make this type of cutting edge design impossible.

Those requirements have been current for a good 60 years now and show no signs of changing. Almost seems like a lost cause..

[Alonzo-ny]

Good office towers are still possible, look at the new trade center towers. However it may take a genius to translate office requirements into something this graceful.

[scumonkey]

conjures up visions of the past!
http://i211.photobucket.com/albums/bb276/scumonkey/Metropolisposter.jpg

http://i211.photobucket.com/albums/bb276/scumonkey/color_city.jpg

[Ebola]

This is amazing. I just don't know what else to say. We should all meet up and have a group hug.

[lofter1]

Scads of documents for this project have recently been recorded at the NYC Department of Finance website (the images below are all about 30% the size of the images at the DOF site).

The project covers eight separate lots, a grouping of four lots along W. 53rd Street (numbers 49, 51, 53 & 55) and another grouping of four lots along W. 54th Street (numbers 44, 46, 48 & 50).

The two groups of lots are each ~ 85' wide by 100' deep and meet up in an off-set alignment at mid-block. Total SF of the combined Lots = ~ 17,000 SF.

A Map of the site from DOF docs:

http://i130.photobucket.com/albums/p242/Lofter1/MoMA/MoMA%20Nouvel%20Docs/MoMA53_DOF_Lot53_01a3.jpg

Here are some of the other documents at DOF:

A DEED (http://a836-acris.nyc.gov/Scripts/DocSearch.dll/Detail?Doc_ID=2007051600479001) dated 5.03.2007 between MoMA / Hines ($125,548,450.00) showing the various lot numbers / addresses.

http://i130.photobucket.com/albums/p242/Lofter1/MoMA/MoMA%20Nouvel%20Docs/MoMA53_DOF_Deed_01a2.jpg

A MORTGAGE (http://a836-acris.nyc.gov/Scripts/DocSearch.dll/Detail?Doc_ID=2007110201088001) dated 10.31.2007 between Hines / Eurohypo AG ($83,287,000.00) with a "Description of Premises AIR PARCEL".

http://i130.photobucket.com/albums/p242/Lofter1/MoMA/MoMA%20Nouvel%20Docs/MoMA53_DOF_Mort_Air_01a2.jpg

An AMENDED DECLARATION (http://a836-acris.nyc.gov/Scripts/DocSearch.dll/Detail?Doc_ID=2007040201612004) dated 3.22.2007 with various floor plans showing links between the existing MoMA building and the new Nouvel building.

"Mezzanine" Floor:

http://i130.photobucket.com/albums/p242/Lofter1/MoMA/MoMA%20Nouvel%20Docs/MoMA53_DOF_Mezz_01a.jpg

Ground Floor:

http://i130.photobucket.com/albums/p242/Lofter1/MoMA/MoMA%20Nouvel%20Docs/MoMA53_DOF_Floor1_01a.jpg

Fourth Floor:

http://i130.photobucket.com/albums/p242/Lofter1/MoMA/MoMA%20Nouvel%20Docs/MoMA53_DOF_Floor4_01a.jpg

Sixth Floor:

http://i130.photobucket.com/albums/p242/Lofter1/MoMA/MoMA%20Nouvel%20Docs/MoMA53_DOF_Floor6_01a.jpg

[MidtownGuy]

We should all meet up and have a group hug.]

LOL. I was thinking, I never saw such unanimous praise and agreement on this forum, it's downright heartwarming.:)

[JMGarcia]

I just want to know who I have to bribe to get an exact height figure out of. :confused:

[NYatKNIGHT]

^And a construction timeframe.

]

LOL. I was thinking, I never saw such unanimous praise and agreement on this forum, it's downright heartwarming.:)

Exactly. Note what we all seem to agree upon: good development, bold statements, innovative architecture.

[Scraperfannyc]

I think it is apparant to everyone that this project is being built to make an architectual statement and that there are few, if any, cutting corners here.

Let the New New York begin.

[BigMac]

It's refreshing to see something other than a box rise in New York these days, and so high...not that a box can't be done right (7WTC for example, and even Hearst to an extent).

[NYguy]

This is turning into my favorite Manhattan skyscraper...

http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/89036667/original.jpg


Right up there with the best of'em...

http://skypic.com/newyork/IMG_3478.JPG
skypic.com

[Ebola]

Even over at SSC, not even ONE person has made a negative comment about it! How can that be? :eek:

[ablarc]

]LOL. I was thinking, I never saw such unanimous praise and agreement on this forum, it's downright heartwarming.:)
Even over at SSC, not even ONE person has made a negative comment about it! How can that be? :eek:
Could it be ... just possibly ... that beauty is not ... after all ... in the eye of the beholder?





(Can it possibly have an objective basis that transcends opinion and communicates with us all?)

[investordude]

I know there are bigger projects out there, but in terms of pure architectural beauty, I can't really think of a project right now anywhere in the world that's better than this. Hyperbole, or is New York finally getting a building it deserves?

[RandySavage]

^ It's definitely among them. It's the first NYC building in generations that advances the mythic New York without feeling like a gimmick. It's the real deal: a potential classic on the scale of Chrysler or ESB.

http://blog.miragestudio7.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/new_york_skyscraper_sex_cult.jpg

[Alonzo-ny]

Where else in the world would such a huge tower grow out of a skinny midblock site sandwiched between other buildings.

[Scraperfannyc]

NYC really needs this building. This building will get national and international praise and NYC will again be in the top ranks of building the world's greatest buildings (I am excluding the WTC as I consider this as a replacement of what was lost). At this point, the reward and fame for building this kind of quality will be realized and it would only make sense that more will follow.

BTW, It is interesting that this building was built on an empty lot, along with one of its competitors, the chicago spire.

[Alonzo-ny]

(I am excluding the WTC as I consider this as a replacement of what was lost). .

I dont think its so cut and dry, we are getting brand new mostly amazing buildings at the wtc even though they are replacing something they are still brand new.

Excuse the crappy photoshopping but i wanted an idea of how this baby will look on the skyline, hopefully im not too far off with height.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2357/2038457213_6cf1b1db35_o.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2353/2038456935_808bba5bcd_o.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2134/2039251944_68a5c9ce80_b.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2301/2038456079_919a78facc_b.jpg

[spyguy999]

This building is simply amazing.
http://img57.imageshack.us/img57/440/501910ak4.jpg

[mhh222]

This proposal is stunning. What else can you say? What an upgrade to the NYC skyline and it only reinforces what a disappointment the Freedom Tower is!

[lofter1]

It is interesting that this building was built on an empty lot ...

Only an empty lot since they demo'ed various buildings on the site over the past few years.

And if the lot weren't empty, how could they build on it :confused:

[lofter1]

Hate to burst your bubble (especially after all the work you put into it :cool: ) but I think you're showing this WAY too tall --

It's been discussed as similar in height to the Chrysler, no?



Excuse the crappy photoshopping but i wanted an idea of how this baby will look on the skyline, hopefully im not too far off with height.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2134/2039251944_68a5c9ce80_b.jpg

[MidtownGuy]

That photoshopped skyline with this added...will it really be as tall/taller than the ESB? Wow, I'm just amazed.
It's kind of cool that one of our tallest buildings will be connected to one of our greatest museums, a symbol of the enduring importance of the arts and good design to this city.

[MidtownGuy]

I wish we could hope for at least 3 more of this or greater height on the West Side, with good design too. That would be amazing for New York's skyline.

[Alonzo-ny]

I tried to base it on a 1300' tip height which is what im guessing based on those models. I wouldnt believe the silouette diagram as I am pretty sure that was done by the newspaper based on what they thought its height is.

[lofter1]

I like it taller ...

You might be right at 1300 (http://wirednewyork.com/forum/showpost.php?p=198544&postcount=129) http://wirednewyork.com/forum/images/icons/icon14.gif

[pianoman11686]

I read the NYTimes article yesterday and was blown away. I just had to come back and see the thread. And I can honestly say, I've never seen so much excitement on the forum before. What an incredible new tower.

[Ebola]

I like it taller ...

You might be right at 1300 (http://wirednewyork.com/forum/showpost.php?p=198544&postcount=129) http://wirednewyork.com/forum/images/icons/icon14.gif


1,300 would be even greater.

Keep in mind that the New York Times sucks when it comes to unveiling the final heights of skyscrapers. At first, they said that 2-4WTC were something in the range of 1,100' to 1,500' tall and our hopes came crashing down a tad when we found out that NYT had the heights about 300 feet too tall.

All I can say is that we should hope for the best and pray that this tower really is taller than the ESB. I do agree that this tower does look taller than 1,050, but all we can do is wait for a real number. Since it seems like they have detailed renderings and other crap, they must be close to having a final height.

[scumonkey]

I've read that this building will be taller than the Chrysler building which is
1,046 feet.
No where have I seen that this building will be taller than the Empire state,
which is only 1,250 feet....
I think there is a lot of wishful thinking going on around here, (not that it wouldn't be nice to get something taller)?!

[Alonzo-ny]

Not wishful thinking at all, we scaled off of an accurate reference that we knew the height of and worked it out from there. There seems to have been no accurate references to height yet its all speculation for now.

[kz1000ps]

I've read that this building will be taller than the Chrysler building which is
1,046 feet.
No where have I seen that this building will be taller than the Empire state,
which is only 1,250 feet....
I think there is a lot of wishful thinking going on around here

Alright, so let's split the difference between those two: 1,148 feet.

Everybody happy?

[Alonzo-ny]

Lets all wait and see. No point throwing around baseless heights, lets just revel in the design! Height will be a supreme bonus.

[Ebola]

Yes, we all need to be good boys and girls and wait for a final height, like what we did for the WTC.

Boy, if this tower really is around 1,300 feet tall, it would just be more amazing news. "Amazing" is the only word I can think of right now.

Even of this tower were only 800 feet tall, it would still be amazing, and we know it's much taller than that.


I know this cliche question may have been asked before, and I may kill myself depending on the answer, but what are the chances of this really getting built?

[Scraperfannyc]

Only an empty lot since they demo'ed various buildings on the site over the past few years.

And if the lot weren't empty, how could they build on it :confused:

Still though, it was bought as an empty lot. Point being is that there is no needless destruction needed to build what may be the most exciting tower going up in NYC in midtown today. Pretty amazing fact.

[sfenn1117]

I read the NYTimes article yesterday and was blown away. I just had to come back and see the thread. And I can honestly say, I've never seen so much excitement on the forum before. What an incredible new tower.

Pianoman it is so great to see you back!!

[Alonzo-ny]

Very commercial area so not much in the way of nimbys.

[nysurfdude]

Man o man this tower came out from left field and has blown my mind! Im in love and want to anounce it on top of a mountain! can only hope its all thumbs up, and presumably so, what would be the predicted time table to get the hammer on the nail?

[lofter1]

Very commercial area so not much in the way of nimbys.
Except for that Very Expernsive real estate just across the street on the north side of West 54th ...

[Alonzo-ny]

Its not expensive, i just don't want to live there.

[RandySavage]

The MoMA has always been difficult to find compared to the great locations enjoyed by the Met, AMNH, Guggenheim, Whitney, etc. The museum has got to be pleased that this landmark tower will server as a beacon.

[lofter1]

Possibly the seeds of what we see now (images from The City Review (http://www.thecityreview.com/moma.html)) ...

A little double-peaked prismatic tower that Rem Koolhaas proposed
during the previous MoMA expansion competition back in 1998:

http://www.thecityreview.com/momarem.gif
Koolhaas scheme called for
a dramatic new small tower

And something similar from Herzong & de Meuron:

http://www.thecityreview.com/herzog.gif
Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron created
a very complex prism, shown in dark lucite above,
to west of the Museum Tower

[antinimby]

Pianoman it is so great to see you back!!Wow, that was some hiatus. Yes, welcome back piano.

By the way, I still don't know how they could build this big when the site is actually zoned with an 8 FAR (which is actually lower than surrounding sites and as an example, the Financial Times building next door has a 10 FAR) and even if they transferred air rights, it would be a whole lot of transferring.

Anyway, this baby's even got a website up and running already: 53w53.com (http://www.53w53.com/)

[lofter1]

From a post in this thread (http://wirednewyork.com/forum/showpost.php?p=138704&postcount=53) in January 2007 (announcing the sale of the site to Hines)
showing the lot to the west of MoMA / Folk Art Museum where the Nouvel proposal will rise ...

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/01/03/arts/03muse_CA1.650.jpg

And, a few posts later, an initial rendering of the new tower ...

http://www.cityrealty.com/graphics/uploads/1167859495_momahines.gif

+++

[antinimby]

Did I remember someone asking about the timetable for the start of construction?

Well, it is mentioned in here:

Hines Unveils 75-Story Building Design



By Natalie Dolce
Last updated: November 16, 2007 (http://www.globest.com/news/1037_1037/newyork/166069-1.html) 12:25pm

NEW YORK CITY-Hines has formally selected Paris-based architect Jean Nouvel as the designer of a new 75-story building slated for a key parcel in Midtown Manhattan, adjacent to the Museum of Modern Art. Nouvel’s design will rise 75 stories from the 17,000-sf site between 53rd and 54th streets just west of MoMA.

Currently, a mix of uses is contemplated for the building including: a 50,000-sf expansion of MoMA’s galleries, levels two to five; a 100-room, seven-star hotel and 120 highest-end residential condominiums on the upper floors. The project will likely commence pre-sales in late 2008.

David Penick, VP of Hines development, tells GlobeSt.com that Hines purchased the site in early 2007 for an undisclosed cost. As of now, Penick does not have a projected project cost, however he does note that since it is almost 2008 now, there needs to be at least a year for planning, design and final approvals. Construction should commence in early 2009, he says.

Nouvel’s design maximizes the site while considering the city’s zoning envelope, according to a Hines release. The proposed building’s silhouette tapers as it rises to a spire and will have a steel and glass facade.

Gerald Hines, chairman of Hines, explains in a release that Nouvel’s concept has the potential to become an international architectural design icon. The Hines firm has collaborated with Nouvel on both 40 Mercer in New York’s SoHo neighborhood and on the C1 Tower currently under development in Paris. Penick tells GlobeSt.com that it is because of the 40 Mercer experience that the firm was attracted to Jean Nouvel for this particular project.

Hines, who developed Philip Johnson's "Lipstick Building" at 885 Third Ave., has been active in New York City since 1981. The company has three other residential projects under way in the city including One Jackson Sq. in Greenwich Village.

Among Nouvel’s completed buildings are the Arab World Institute, Paris; Lyon Opera House; Cartier Foundation, Paris; Galeries Lafayette department store, Berlin; Lucerne Culture and Congress Center; Tours Conference Center; the Hotel in Lucerne; Andel office building, Prague; Nantes Justice Center; Dentsu Tower, Tokyo; museum of archaeology, Périgueux; the technology center in Wismar; Agbar office tower, Barcelona; extension to the Queen Sofia museum, Madrid; Quai Branly Museum, Paris; Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis; Brembo’s research and development centre; and the Richemont Corp. headquarters in Geneva.

Copyright © 2007 ALM Properties, Inc.

[ramvid01]

Construction starting in early 2009. That bothers me a bit. A year and a few months seems very long, but hopefully this project will not be altered (at all hopefully) and is still economically viable.

[antinimby]

Yeah, it'll just make for a very intense and fingernail-biting year and half for many here.

[ramvid01]

^^ Well with more than a year of finger-nail bitting you better hope you don't bite off parts of your fingers. :D

[antinimby]

I would easily go through this much fingernails in that span of time. :D

http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2006/08/leeredmondAP180806_446x600.jpg

[aural iNK]

What is interesting is there appears to be two different models, as seen below. The shorter version on the right matches the rest of the renderings, which is unfortunate because I feel the taller version has nicer proportions. My guess is this will end up somewhere around 1150'.

http://www.graffitibiz.com/moma.jpg

[GVNY]

/\ Good God, look at those nails!

[NoyokA]

What is interesting is there appears to be two different models, as seen below. The shorter version on the right matches the rest of the renderings, which is unfortunate because I feel the taller version has nicer proportions. My guess is this will end up somewhere around 1150'.

Good pick up. All the renderings coincide with the shorter crown. The version with the taller crown was probably value-engineered. Hopefully there isn't any further value-engineering, but even if this building was 800 feet, it would still be great!

[MidtownGuy]

Personally I would be very disappointed if this was only 800 ft. It would then slip unseen right into the midtown plateau. For me, a good deal of my excitement resulted from knowing we are finally getting a new companion to ESB and Chrysler. So, I'm really hoping for the highest height.

[Adyton]

What is interesting is there appears to be two different models, as seen below. The shorter version on the right matches the rest of the renderings, which is unfortunate because I feel the taller version has nicer proportions. My guess is this will end up somewhere around 1150'.

http://www.graffitibiz.com/moma.jpg

aural iNK is right... the shorter (correct) version is at least 1150' or as the articles say "taller than Chrysler". If you look at the First Times tower at 496' next to the model and see where the top ends next to the updated model on the right you can approximate the height being between 1150' to 1300' (including spire). So... we should start a office pool in guessing the height. Any takers? Can a moderator set up a poll? :D

[Alonzo-ny]

Why a year, design seems pretty far along already? Id have thought construction mid 08 given they have the site cleared, financing I beleive and a pretty good design that doesnt need changed.

[stache]

Can a moderator set up a poll? :D

Anyone can set up a poll!

[DarrylStrawberry]

I love the interaction between the exterior and interior structural elements of this building. Awesome.

http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/entreejn-copie2.jpg

[NoyokA]

Why a year, design seems pretty far along already? Id have thought construction mid 08 given they have the site cleared, financing I beleive and a pretty good design that doesnt need changed.

Even if designs were complete, I get the impression they aren't close yet given the complexity of the design, they still need to get approvals, which for a project like this could be a difficult, long process. They also need to give out contracts.

[NoyokA]

Personally I would be very disappointed if this was only 800 ft. It would then slip unseen right into the midtown plateau. For me, a good deal of my excitement resulted from knowing we are finally getting a new companion to ESB and Chrysler. So, I'm really hoping for the highest height.

I would be disapointed too. Given the renderings which seem to show the shorter building, it still makes a substantial impact on the skyline. 1,300 or 1,100 feet doesn't make that much of a difference here for me. At 800 feet it would be disapointing because it wouldnt singlehandedly change the skyline, but it would still be a gem nevertheless. That said hopefully this baby stay where it is.

[TREPYE]

Fascinating design so distinct from various angles. I cannot stop staring at this particular rendering just SUBLIME. :)


http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/89036667/original.jpg

[TREPYE]

Now that we know NYC can get designs like this.....

http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/above-view.jpg

...nobody should try to justify and or makes excuses for garbage like this anymore.....

http://i19.tinypic.com/4md2irm.jpg