C110 article

Worth Waiting For?

MoMA returns to Manhattan and Gemma Tipton was at the opening.

3rd floor with view of the David and Peggy Rockefeller Building, the Museum of Modern Art, designed by Yoshio Taniguchi; photo © 2004 Timothy Hursley; courtesy MoMA

In 1997, Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao opened its doors to a wildly enthusiastic public and redefined what an art museum might be. In December of that year, two months after the titanium Guggenheim had opened, the Museum of Modern Art in New York selected an architect for its own rebuilding project. By opting for the understated Modernism of Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi's proposal, it seemed as if MoMA was defining itself in opposition to the Guggenheim, as if the fireworks of the Guggenheim's building and PR programme gave MoMA two choices: compete or leave the field. Now, seven years later, as MoMA reopens its rebuilt Manhattan site, it is evident that MoMA instead pursued a third course - that of ignoring them altogether.

Exterior view of the David and Peggy Rockefeller Building from West 54th Street, the Museum of Modern Art, designed by Yoshio Taniguchi; photo © 2004 Timothy Hursley; courtesy MoMA

At the time of the MoMA selection process, a series of discussions had been staged with artists and architects. Lectures were held, and the results were published in a book Imagining the Future of the Museum of Modern Art, which rather hilariously claimed on its back cover that "during the past year, no other single project has so seized the attention of the international world of architecture and design as the announced expansion and rebuilding of The Museum of Modern Art in New York" - with no mention of the Guggenheim at all. A friend in the New York said to me at the time, "MoMA is becoming irrelevant."

Out in its small temporary home in Long Island City, perhaps that was true, but the first thing one is aware of on a tour of MoMA's renewed 53^rd Street building is how absolutely astonishing its collection is. No other museum of contemporary art has anything to touch it - perhaps unsurprisingly, since MoMA itself was responsible for defining the canon and history of contemporary art when it first opened in 1929. Since MoMA commenced its rebuilding project, the Guggenheim's expansionism has experienced a backlash, and the inhospitability of the Bilbao building to art has been increasingly noted. Meanwhile, Taniguchi says that his goal is to make architecture that "disappears." It may or may not disappear, but it definitely comes at a price. Taniguchi's MoMA cost $425 million to build (the Guggenheim Bilbao cost a mere $100 million in comparison). The ego of the architect is mainly to be seen in the meticulous finishing and fixtures of the build, and in the persuasive subtlety of its spaces. Indeed, in a self-effacing move at odds with the architectural façadism of so many gallery and museum projects, the original 1939 frontage by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durrell Stone, and that of Philip Johnson's East Wing (1964), have been restored.

The Museum of Modern Art, designed by Yoshio Taniguchi. Entrance at 53rd Street; photo © 2004 Timothy Hursley; courtesy MoMA

Visiting a brand new gallery is always exciting; there is a sense of potential, of hope that you well see, and experience, things that transport you, engage you. At MoMA that sense is justified, though tempered by the weight of its overt institutional self-importance. Once inside the building, a spacious lobby gives onto a light-filled thirty-four-metre-high atrium looking onto MoMA's famous sculpture garden, a garden which had, until now, always seemed a little sad and neglected. A green slate stairway leads up to the art, where Monet's Waterlilies look a little startled to be sharing the space with Barnett Newman's Broken obelisk.. Chief Curator John Elderfield says his goal is to "help newer works seem familiar, but to make older works seem new again." "Otherwise," he said, when I asked him about the placement, "they can start to seem like reproductions of themselves."

The galleries themselves are classically proportioned white boxes, laid out to allow a choice of visitor routes, with balconies providing views and access, rather than a single prescriptive path. They vary in size, from relatively intimate, right up to the drama of sixty-one columnless metres. In all, MoMA's exhibition space has increased from the existing 26,000 m2 to 38,000 m2 to serve their 1.8 million visitors per year.

So does it work? Yes, elegantly and beautifully, but elegance doesn't address the question of relevance. Is MoMA's Modernism still relevant? Given its provocative beginnings, shouldn't a more innovative building have been conceived? One that gets up there and shouts about the art? On balance, I think not. What Taniguchi and MoMA have understood is that much contemporary art is based on a tension between artist and institution, and this is a building that reflects the institutional structure and power of MoMA. They have also understood the nature of a true classic, in the creation of a building which won't seem dated in a decade. And while I hesitate to characterize architecture in artistic terms, like the defining pieces in MoMA's collection, it is a building which will stand the test of time. Whether it will win the undeclared battle to define the soul of the gallery space remains to be seen.

Gemma Tipton is a writer on art and architecture based in Dublin and is Editor of Contexts magazine.

Article reproduced from CIRCA 110, Winter 2004, pp.34–35
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