When the architect Elizabeth Diller talks about glass, she evokes the progressive, quixotic European doctrines of a century ago. Bruno Taut’s Glass Pavilion, which was built in 1914 for an exhibition, inspired Paul Scheerbart, a poet and author of fantasy novels, to write “Glass Architecture,” an essay describing an imaginary transparent city of the future. “If we want our culture to rise to a higher level,” Scheerbart said, “we are obliged, for better or for worse, to change our architecture. . . . We can only do that by introducing glass architecture, which lets in the lights of the sun, the moon, and the stars, nor merely through a few windows but through every possible wall.” Diller describes her firm’s expansion and renovation of New York’s Museum of Modern Art as guided by “the modernist aspirations of glass, the utopian ones about democratizing space and about the extension between the outside and the inside.”
Diller, whose practice emerged from collaborations with her husband, Ricardo Scofidio, is a co-founder of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, an architectural partnership whose work crosses over into the visual and performing arts. DS+R’s dictum of “adaptive re-use” is best demonstrated in its most famous (and most globally mimicked) project, the High Line, an abandoned elevated railway on Manhattan’s West Side, once slated for demolition by Mayor Rudy Giuliani and now repurposed as a public park. The High Line snakes northward from the meatpacking district, terminating at the new and controversial Hudson Yards development, where DS+R has again altered the city’s cultural fabric by creating the Shed, a multipurpose arts complex with a sliding outer shell, which opened last year. These projects, expressing the firm’s commitment to democratizing public spaces, anticipated the challenges of reinventing MOMA, which, for ninety years, has stood as a monument to the paradoxical alignment of capital and counterculture.
When Tom Wolfe wrote that “Modern Art arrived in the United States in the 1920s not like a rebel commando force but like Standard Oil,” he meant it literally: the museum, New York’s “cathedral of culture”—the first institution of its kind in the world—“was not exactly the brain child of visionary bohemians. It was founded in John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’s living room, to be exact, with Goodyears, Blisses, and Crowninshields in attendance.” The original seeds of this upper-class defiance can be traced to the infamous Armory Show of 1913, which introduced America to Cubism, Fauvism, and Futurism. The crowds were astonished by works by Paul Cézanne, Mary Cassatt, Gustave Courbet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Édouard Manet, Pablo Picasso—who had declared that “museums are just a lot of lies”—and Marcel Duchamp, whose shimmering masterwork “Nude Descending a Staircase” was the outstanding hit of the show. (“That’s not art,” Theodore Roosevelt announced.)
In 1928, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and the Boston textile heir Lillie P. Bliss seized on the idea of a permanent establishment for the kind of European art that they liked but could not find in museums like the Metropolitan, in New York. The two women recruited the lumber heir A. Conger Goodyear, who had been ejected from a gallery board in Buffalo for buying a Picasso, to be their administrator. Goodyear brought in Paul J. Sachs, an investor, and Sachs in turn recruited Alfred Barr, an academic who defended modern painting, to be the project’s director. Their museum opened on November 8, 1929—ten days after Black Tuesday—in a rented office space on Fifty-seventh Street and Fifth Avenue. The first exhibition, a small collection of paintings by Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, and van Gogh, drew curious crowds that overflowed in a line down the block. “It was a fantastic atmosphere,” Margaret Fitzmaurice-Scolari, the art historian, said. “You felt an unbelievable vibration. . . . It was absolutely electric.”
In 1932, when the newborn institution moved into a five-story townhouse on Fifty-third Street that was owned by the Rockefellers, its radical zeal was as undiminished as its breathless patronage by the one per cent, who, like their European counterparts, paid for the privilege of being disrespected, or even outright attacked. The first exhibit there included a mural by the Hungarian immigrant Hugo Gellert, a member of the Communist Party of America, which depicted Henry Ford, President Herbert Hoover, J. P. Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller, Sr., flanked by gunmen and bags of cash and accompanied by America’s most famous gangster. It was called “ ‘Us Fellas Gotta Stick Together’—Al Capone.”
Even before the museum erected its permanent home, on West Fifty-third Street, in 1939, it had fundamentally altered the trajectory of architecture and urban planning with a landmark 1932 exhibit grandly titled “Modern Architecture: International Exhibition.” The curator was Philip Johnson, a wealthy young aesthete whom Barr had invited to broaden the museum’s scope to include photography, graphic arts, and industrial fabrication. Johnson’s “Machine Art” exhibit, in 1934, was, according to his biographer, the critic Mark Lamster, “a sensation from the moment it opened . . . Here were things nobody had considered putting in an art museum before: beakers, a cash register, a circular saw, a Dictaphone, perfume bottles, pans, springs of all sizes, a toaster oven, a waffle maker, a telescope, a vacuum, and even a dentist’s X-ray machine.”
For the architecture showcase, Johnson collected models and drawings of buildings by Europeans like Walter Gropius—who had founded the Bauhaus, a neo-socialist collective of craftsmen, engineers, artists, and architects—and by the Swiss-French painter and architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, whose utopian urban-planning concept, “The Radiant City,” was expressed in a 1925 sponsored study, called “The Voisin Plan City,” which proposed demolishing broad sections of Paris and replacing them with rows of identical cruciform residential towers interspersed with elevated freeways, concrete walkways, and courtyards of featureless grass. Wolfe wrote that Johnson’s accompanying book, co-authored with Henry-Russell Hitchcock, a Wesleyan lecturer who wrote influential articles on design, “gave no indication that the International Style—and their label caught on immediately—had originated in any social setting, any terra firma, whatsoever.” Frank Lloyd Wright, declining an invitation to participate, condemned the style as “communistic,” disdaining the curators as a “self-selected group of formalizers . . . superficial and ignorant.”
The museum’s flagship structure—the 1939 faux-Bauhaus imposture done by Philip L. Goodwin, a society architect, and Edward Durell Stone, whom Rockefeller admired for the elegant deco execution of his Radio City Music Hall—was disdained by Johnson, who, in the process of remaking himself as a stratospherically prestigious architect, was invited to counteract the building’s shortcomings. MOMA’s first westward addition, the taut and elegant Grace Rainey Rogers Memorial Wing, done by Johnson in 1951, and since demolished, was, according to Lamster, “a masterpiece . . . the first glass-walled modern building to rise in New York, but that’s the story of MoMA, the constant tearing itself down to remake itself, often for the worse.” There is no visible trace of Johnson’s next, larger addition, the 1964 East Wing, except its black glass façade, but his eternally serene Sculpture Garden, from 1953, remains essentially intact.
In the postwar decades, modern art, modern architecture, and the museum all faltered and languished. The once brazen International Style could now be found everywhere, its Platonic forms duly copied out in diluted, increasingly mundane degrees of fidelity to the thrilling European originals. In the late nineteen-fifties, Johnson collaborated with Pietro Belluschi, Gordon Bunshaft, Wallace Harrison, and Eero Saarinen on another Rockefeller project, planned with Robert Moses: the demolition of the San Juan Hill neighborhood to make way for the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, a set of ersatz-Italian piazzas flanked by white limestone brutalist auditoriums that present the surrounding streets with impenetrable stone walls. Lamster said, “If you look at the new formalism of the sixties, Lincoln Center with its monumentality and its stark whiteness and its classicism and its insistence on authority—there’s something fascistic about that.” (Johnson’s defiant insistence on the amoral purity of his aesthetics reached its apotheosis in the kitschy towers he was happy to build, much later, for Donald Trump.)
By the nineteen-seventies, Le Corbusier’s Platonic “Radiant City” had found dismal, artless expression in low-income, high-density housing projects: St. Louis’s infamous 1972 demolition of its failed Pruitt-Igoe complex was bitterly commemorated by Charles Jencks, the critic and scholar, as the moment that “Modern Architecture died.” In 1984—at the cusp of the dreary Ed Koch-era midtown construction boom—MOMA reached its nadir, erecting a luxury condominium high-rise designed by César Pelli, the dean of Yale’s architecture school, the proceeds of which would fund the museum’s expansion. The bland intrusion of Pelli’s pastel-speckled Museum Tower—anonymous in the skyline and on the street—allowed a doubling of exhibition space but required the sacrifice of a portion of the sculpture garden to provide a protruding atrium of escalators, creating the atmosphere of a shopping mall.
By the century’s final decades, modernism had receded into the past, a historical movement like any other. The ennobling emplacement of bohemian art work into plutocratic, cosmopolitan galleries had lost its shocking novelty, while the increasing insularity and academic remove of new “isms” in painting and sculpture had unmoored modern art from its social and political purpose. “Many people think the modernist laboratory is now vacant,” the critic Robert Hughes concluded in his elegiac retrospective “The Shock of the New.” “It has become less an arena for significant experiment and more like a period room in a museum, a historical space that we can enter, look at, but no longer be part of,” he wrote. “In art, we are at the end of the modernist era, but this is not—as some critics apparently think—a matter for self-congratulation. What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore.”
For its next expansion, in 2004, the leaders of MOMA—apparently sensing that something was amiss—rejected the ossified hierarchy of the Western architectural establishment and returned to Euclidean basics, passing over Frank Gehry, I. M. Pei, and other obvious candidates in favor of Yoshio Taniguchi, who had designed eight museums in Japan but nothing anywhere else. Taniguchi’s formalist credentials were perfect, and his elaborate new construction for MOMA was almost monastically restrained. (“It is so minimalist, it is baroque,” Paola Antonelli, a MOMA curator, said). But, a decade later, it was clear that the attempted revitalization had failed—MOMA’s rarified and insular philosophy had fallen out of step with the city and the times. “The Taniguchi was basically a disaster,” Lamster said. “The problem has nothing to do with taste. . . . It has to do with functionality and the way the museum works [and] the changing nature of New York.”
MOMA now has a divided purpose: it is committed to showcasing its aging treasures while upholding its perpetual obligation to find the best and most important contemporary work—to probe for the shocking and new while preserving the spoils of all previous conquests. The current renovation—the most comprehensive since MOMA’s founding—is built around a paradigmatic curatorial shift, long in development, that has completely changed how the museum considers, acquires, and displays its art. “We rightly use the word ‘experimental,’ ” Glenn Lowry, MOMA’s director since 1995, said as he explained the new scheme, which will necessitate a radical acceleration in the rotational process of each gallery, aggressively blending the old and the new and replacing a full thirty per cent of the displayed artwork every six months. “When you think back on Alfred Barr and what MOMA meant when it was originally founded . . . to have a department of architecture, design, film, beyond painting and sculpture; that was amazing and revolutionary,” Diller recalled, “but that felt out of touch with the way that people tell the stories of the twentieth century—it was a lack of diversity both geographically and racially in the way that modernism was depicted.”
The bold move of erasing the presentational divisions between types of art will, according to Ann Temkin, the chief curator of painting and sculpture, allow MOMA to “tell the kind of multitudes of stories that we think our history is made of.” Just as Philip Johnson displayed machine-tooled bearings next to sculptures next to photographs next to posters, the reorganization will be “a return to the museum’s roots . . . We’re going back to the initial feeling of the thrill of the simultaneity of those different art forms.” (Defending the scale of the proposed expansion, in 2014, Temkin called MOMA “a catalyst . . . a center of art production, a great international center, akin to Florence in the Renaissance” where artists have been “inspired, challenged and provoked to make art that equalled or outdid what they’ve seen on our walls.” Displaying the full scope of the collection, she said, is “our responsibility, we feel, to the art of tomorrow.”) Not all staff members were on board: Pedro Gadanho, who was until recently a MOMA architecture curator and is currently a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University, wanted to preserve MOMA’s classic, siloed operation, since “a gallery dedicated to architecture—as for photography, design, or drawings and prints—allowed for relatively autonomous, fast-track decision-making on relevant thematic exhibitions from these fields.” While the proposed reorganization meant that “more works from [those] departments will be permanently on view, possibly in a thought-provoking dialogue with others,” Gadanho worried that “increasing committee-based decisions and competition regarding space” could mean that “those earlier opportunities [would] become sparser.”
In 2014, discussing the selection of DS+R, Lowry explained that the museum’s leaders were impressed with the firm’s “proven ability to give new life to existing buildings,” referring less to the High Line than to the firm’s mammoth 2010 rejuvenation of Lincoln Center, where—as with MOMA—it was necessary to follow Philip Johnson and his contemporaries, rethinking another era’s insular and outdated approach to large-scaled, urban cultural monoliths. “Both Lincoln Center and MOMA are modernist projects that we tried to realign [with] where we are in the twenty-first century,” Diller explained. “Lincoln Center was the victim of fifties megablock planning”—a chilling application of Le Corbusier’s “Radiant City” dictum, by which an organic, multiethnic, working-class neighborhood was vaporized to yield space for sterile, elevated plazas—“that brought art up to this rarefied domain above the street.”
Beyond resolving the Taniguchi building’s crippling circulatory problems and tonal issues—the lobby, according to Diller, “didn’t have enough gravitas,” prompting “surgical” additions, including a new double-height entrance—DS+R “didn’t really have a brief” other than the museum’s pre-planned, controversial expansion scheme. First, they had to place new galleries into the base of 53 West Fifty-third Street, an adjacent skyscraper built by the French architect Jean Nouvel, which has a contrasting, trendy design. “We’re a parasitic occupant of the lower levels,” Charles Renfro, who became a partner in 2004, said jokingly. This requirement, Diller pointed out, is a harbinger of interlocked, symbiotic urban planning of the future: “It’s a vertical city; it’s a dense city, and very often we have programs that are overlapping, and so we don’t always have a property and just extrude up—there are all kinds of ways of thinking about property in three dimensions.”
More alarming was how the plan called for the demolition of the thirteen-year-old American Folk Art Museum, a small-scaled, charming confection designed by Billie Tsien and Tod Williams, with a free-form copper façade that abutted MOMA. “For the Museum of Modern Art to wreck a piece of modern architecture, that really hurt,” Lamster said. “We weren’t convinced that the Folk Art had to come down, and we wanted to see if there was a solution,” Diller explained. “It was a colleague’s building; we were extremely sensitive to why and how [it got there], and we wanted to articulate the spot—we called it ‘the space of exception.’ ” That volume is now occupied by a resurrected “projects room” and a performance-ready studio space that works like a miniature Shed. “We suggested right from the beginning . . . that MOMA needed to be more civic in nature, more open to the city street and to the public,” Diller said. “Our biggest critique was that transactional feel—the lack of agency that the public had. . . . You step in and then you’re on line to get a ticket” while the art “was half a mile away . . . How could the art be closer to the street?”
The finished structure exhibits a formal purity that Le Corbusier would have admired: there are stylistic and aesthetic nuances throughout, but no decorative elements to interfere with the bare engineering. “There’s nothing about architectural ego in this at all,” Renfro insists. “Most people won’t even understand what’s happened, but it’s actually quite radical.” A tour of the new areas allows Renfro to point out the improved acoustics, “making the museum quiet in the spaces of transition . . . like it’s a moment of repose,” and also the refined, state-of-the-art material palate: the widened wood-plank floors; with neoprene pads concealed beneath that soften the blow of each footstep; the burled maple walls; the custom-built L.E.D. illumination system; the ninety-five-thousand-pound stainless-steel canopy cantilevered over the newly enlarged entrance; the trademark “blade stair” that floats in a sublime suspension without visible supports; and, especially, all the new glass. Work was done on “almost every part of MOMA, but in a very surgical way, with a very light touch,” Renfro explained, “[to] domesticate the experience, make it more formal and more intimate, bringing air into the whole building. You’ll see many places where we’ve created places to congregate, rest, relax and take a breather, because the museum can be exhausting.”
This new MOMA is exhausting—and serene, and thrilling, and, finally, to a degree that only the greatest museums achieve, transcendental. Wandering the vast new spaces, tracing the familiar chronology of modernism through hushed, looming galleries built to a Louvre-like scale, following its sinewy path through sliding-glass portals and brushed-steel apertures that give seamlessly from Pelli to Taniguchi to DS+R (and Nouvel, thanks to the interthreading of the buildings), a visitor is overwhelmed by the grace and passion and precision of the art, new and old, canonical and obscure, fleeting and immortal.
The curatorial revolution is revealed by the new signage—the familiar “Painting and Sculpture” gallery sequence, interspersed with selective displays of “Prints and Drawings” or “Photography,” has been replaced by a single word, “Collection,” and this new scheme instantly does its trick. The first room presents van Gogh’s “Starry Night” beside Rousseau’s “The Sleeping Gypsy”—both cleaned and restored—and the next responds with digitally projected clips from “Lime Kiln Club Field Day,” from 1913, the oldest surviving film to feature African-American actors. The next gallery hits the eyes with Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (which the new gallery text describes as seeming “to have no lesser goal than the complete reinvention of Western painting”) set against Faith Ringgold’s “American People Series #20: Die,” from 1967, a composition based on Picasso’s “Guernica,” intended, according to the artist, as a response to street riots of the nineteen-sixties and an “abstraction of what the fights were really all about . . . they had a lot to do with race and class, and no one was left out.”
As the canonical progression makes its slow spiral earthward, the new scale and scope of the retrieved modern narrative, much like its kaleidoscopic re-presentation, continues to stun. Here are all the familiar icons: Edward Hopper’s lonely streets and Andy Warhol’s soup cans; Frank Stella’s earth-toned geometries and Jackson Pollock’s explosive Freudian explorations; Roy Lichtenstein’s “Drowning Girl,” finally with room to breathe; Jasper Johns’s flags; a thicket of Brancusi now blissfully alone in a Taniguchi hall that was once given over to a café; Matisse’s astounding “The Red Studio,” as brazen and delicate today as it was in 1913, at the Armory Show.
The room-sized art work is all here: Matisse’s “The Swimming Pool,” Monet’s “Water Lilies,” Richard Serra’s “Equal,” each forty-ton block requiring reinforcements in the floor. Throughout, there are serendipitous interruptions that flaunt the new scheme: an entire room dedicated to Frank O’Hara, the poet and MOMA curator whose tragic death was commemorated by the 1967 volume “In Memory of My Feelings,” the originals of the pages, each illuminated by a different artist (Johns, Elaine de Kooning, and others) lining a wall. Remnants of modern architecture’s meta-narrative are solemn milestones, the bold urban dreams of the past preserved here as aging tokens: a spectral, faded black-and-white film of Le Corbusier, in those trademark eyeglasses, explaining his “Voisin Plan”; grainy documentary footage of the destruction of Pruitt-Igoe; the yellowing and cracked antique model of Goodwin and Stone’s original MOMA building. The multimedia interspersions are relentless, and welcome: Nam June Paik’s altered television, from the eighties; JODI’s “My%Desktop” projecting vintage Macintosh screens in a dedicated gallery, and, on the ground floor, a commissioned installation by the Parisian artist Philippe Parreno called “Echo,” its digital servers glowing behind glass, that uses a neural net and hyperspatial speakers to alter the incidental sounds of the room’s crowds into “a sensible and sentient automaton that perceives and reflects.”
This bleeding-edge son et lumière floods what is now a vast public space—“I totally believe in the ground level being everyone’s property,” Diller declared—rimmed in Scheerbart’s utopian clear glass and blasted open to the street and the sun, “to connect the museum more substantially to the city,” as Lowry explained, “to open up the museum to the very nature of midtown Manhattan.” “Modernism isn’t dead; glass has new potential,” Diller said. “It’s about holding glass in tension; it’s about making it structural; it’s about pushing the material to its boundaries . . . . to break down those absolute walls between the cultural institution and the public and the city.”
Arriving back in the restored 1939 Bauhaus lobby, beside DS+R’s new Hess Lounge, with its zebra-striped marble (“That thing is crazy,” Lamster marvelled) and its steel-mesh curtain, not even the most jaded visitor can remain unmoved by the recollected century of turbulence and inspiration, and the miraculous cumulative endeavor that resulted. Returning to the loud Manhattan streets is like waking from a dream and trying to hold onto its clarity and force. “The great energies of modernism are still latent in our culture, like Ulysses’ bow in the house of Penelope,” Robert Hughes wrote, in 1980. “The work still speaks to us, in all its voices, and will continue to do so. Art discovers its true social use, not on the ideological plane, but by opening the passage from feeling to meaning—not for everyone, since that would be impossible, but for those who want to try. This impulse seems to be immortal.” From the salons of La Belle Époque to the Rockefeller living room to the perpetually reinvented cathedral of MOMA, that impulse survives and persists, and our world and our city are the richer for it.
