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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
From 1939, Lewis Mumford on the original MOMA building
Paul Goldberger on Yoshio Taniguchi's elegant expansion of MOMA
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...
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