Museum of Modern Art extension, New York, by Diller Scofidio + Renfro

At the Museum of Modern Art in Midtown Manhattan, old and new aren’t immediately discernible from one other. The museum that stands today is an amalgamation of new upon old interventions, where traces of earlier forms have been erased at times, overwritten at others, and buildings have morphed and multiplied, becoming a whole in the museum’s multifaceted history. 

MoMA’s campus spans eight decades and many buildings: the original Goodwin and Stone structure, from 1939; Philip Johnson’s 1964 expansion, around the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden; César Pelli’s 1984 intervention and residential tower; Yoshio Taniguchi’s major expansion that almost doubled MoMA’s gallery space in 2004; and the latest intervention, by Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) in collaboration with Gensler, which, among other things, pushed the envelope of the building to encompass the site of the Folk Art Museum by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, demolished in 2014, and a three-storey gallery in the Geffen Wing, at the base of Jean Nouvel’s residential tower 53W53. 

‘DS+R’s intervention fits right in with the museum’s perpetual renewal’

DS+R’s $450m expansion brought MoMA an extra 30 per cent of gallery space, but what started as a need for more space ‘blossomed’, as Liz Diller, the DS+R partner in charge of the project, says, into a ‘multi-phase collection of surgeries’ across all the existing buildings. As such, DS+R’s intervention fits right in with the museum’s perpetual renewal, new colliding briefly with old, before becoming a thing of the past.

One such novelty stands out early on at street level, where a sleek canopy now defines the 53rd Street entrance. The stark metal plane may well be jutting out of a high-tech business centre, but it adds a much-needed marker to Taniguchi’s design. In its previous iteration, the museum’s modest entrance led to a tunnel-like lobby that stretched between 53rd and 54th Street. Taniguchi had intended the entrance to be a double-height space, but ‘at the eleventh hour, we asked to insert a media gallery’, says Glenn Lowry, director of MoMA since 1995. 

In its current iteration, said media gallery has been removed, making room for a more spacious lobby that is perhaps even too spacious (not helped by the 25 per cent capacity imposed by Covid-19 restrictions). Standing in the central lobby, I am faced with choices. Do I go left, past the new flagship store selling books and gifts that now descends below ground, and continue up the new ‘blade stair’ that connects the old building with the Geffen Wing to the west? Or do I bypass the blade stair and visit the ground-floor galleries first? Instead, do I go right and go into the Sculpture Garden, or take the escalator to the subterranean media gallery? Or should I take the low stair up to the first-floor atrium? ‘The logic of the lobby allows people to see what their options are in terms of circulations’, says Lowry. Options are good, but too many can be overwhelming. 

When I reach the centre of the lobby, I’m prompted to download a map via a large digital screen. Throughout my visit, I find myself clinging to that map, loading it and reloading it every time I want to know where I am and where I want to go. Clearly, it isn’t just me: ‘We were hoping visitors would feel comfortable to get lost’, says Lowry, ‘but all studies we did suggest that people want to know where they’re going.’ The museum introduced a more flexible approach that doesn’t impose ‘a kind of ordered understanding of our history’, as Lowry puts it. ‘We said to Liz [Diller], we need to break the tyranny of en suite progression.’ 

So DS+R introduced multiple choices and greater porosity throughout the existing galleries. ‘It’s kind of like different traffic lanes on a highway: you have your slow, medium and fast’, says Diller. ‘Circulation spaces don’t have to be only getting from here to there. There can be spaces to pause, palate-cleansing spaces where you can do other things, rather than being on a relentless circuit of galleries.’ 

The new MoMA is dotted with those palate-cleansing moments, most notably where the old building meets the new Geffen Wing. In the old Taniguchi galleries, the portals between spaces are outlined by a thin stainless-steel frame. By contrast, the new thresholds – between the Taniguchi building and the new wing – form spaces in and of themselves: wider, deeper and made of blackened steel. The transition feels almost ceremonial, like a marker of change. The sound from adjacent galleries gets muffled for a second, the dark steel feels cool to the touch. The flooring changes too, from 4-inch-wide to 8-inch-wide boards that have also been lightened in colour. 

Another palate cleanser is the blade stair, carved out of a piece of the Taniguchi expansion. Together with the new portals, it marks the threshold to the expansion and gives visitors room for pause. Sculptural in quality and minimal in construction, the stair is supported by a thin vertical spine that hangs from the roof, leaving the structure free from any lateral bracing. As visitors climb, they can take in the city through a frameless glass facade. 

This relationship between MoMA and Manhattan goes right back to the museum’s origins. ‘When we built our first custom building, the gambit was that we would differentiate ourselves from a historical museum, like the Met for instance, that is separated from the street’, explains Lowry, referencing the desire of MoMA’s founding director Alfred Barr to make the museum an integral part of the street. In 2004, Taniguchi developed this idea with his ‘through-lobby’. Then in 2019, DS+R pushed it even further. 

One of DS+R’s main critiques of MoMA’s previous iterations was how long it took to reach the art from the entrance. ‘You had to walk in, through a space of housekeeping with ticketing and coat check, up the stairs, through sub-lobbies to get to the galleries, to actually see something,’ Diller remembers. DS+R proposed instead that the entire ground floor be open to the public free of charge. Since 2019, visitors can walk into the building, sit in the lobby to the left, visit the shop downstairs, check out two ground-floor exhibition galleries and take a breather in the Sculpture Garden – all without spending any money. 

 

No longer a compressed space plagued by queues, the ground floor is undoubtedly now more generous; the Sculpture Garden, not so much. Since Philip Johnson envisioned it as a series of outdoor rooms, the Sculpture Garden has been the subject of many alterations, including an attempt to open it to the public that was met with mixed reactions when first announced in 2014. Some thought it a good idea, others worried about overcrowding. Diller seems to belong to the first camp: ‘I always loved that space and, in fact, the very first thing I wanted to do as its architect was to open the ground floor to the garden from the south’, she says of her proposal to create a direct garden entry on 54th Street. ‘We lost that feature to forces outside our control.’ 

Asked about this, Lowry cites high security levels as a big impediment, but most importantly: ‘There were issues around how Philip Johnson understood that space’, he says. Indeed, in his 1994 book Philip Johnson: The Architect in His Own Words, Johnson said the Sculpture Garden is at its best when there are few people, ‘because then you get the feeling of the space. But it can take solid crowds’. It seems that, in this iteration of MoMA, Johnson’s will prevailed. 

Like many aspects of the new MoMA though, this decision makes sense, but emotions win over logic. The garden is sheltered but still feels like a compromise. The lobby is spacious but feels cavernous. The circulation is flexible but feels overwhelming. Arguably, the thresholds are one of the few spaces that appeal to both sides of the brain: because they connect the old and the new, they make sense. And because they acknowledge the difference and bring a moment of pause to a museum that has been in constant change for almost a century, they feel good, too. 

In a way, these thresholds can be seen as the perfect illustration of MoMA as always in process, and that is how Lowry understands it. ‘What has defined us, at least for the first 90 years of our existence, is our ability to adapt and change, sometimes modestly, sometimes dramatically, to the exigencies of the present’, he says. ‘And it has meant an architecture that’s expanded, contracted, changed, been demolished, been rebuilt, been added on. The architecture in and of itself is a work in progress.’