|
COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
John Updike takes a walk through the new Modern
From 1939, Lewis Mumford on the original MOMA building
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...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
