In a city where residential and commercial space is at a premium like nowhere else in America, plans recently announced and undertaken by three prominent modern art museums to expand their facilities have met with a complete spectrum of reaction. The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), one of Manhattan's several world-class institutions, has already reopened with a vastly improved exhibition space, paid for in part by a gigantic condominium tower built above the original building. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, has decided to erect a tower of modest proportion adjacent to the famous white building on upper Fifth Avenue in order to display more of its substantial permanent collection. The Whitney Museum of American Art has proposed to engulf Marcel Breuer's design with a much larger construction on upper Madison Avenue for a full range of spatial needs.
In each case, "art" is the raison detre, real estate is the game, money is the sine qua non, and architectural design is the focus of heated controversy. An examination of these three clearly related situations reveals quite a bit about the stewardship of modern art museums as well as about the on temporary climate of vanguard architecture.
Founded in 1929 by seven wealthy patrons and collectors of art, the Museum of Modern Art opened its doors at 11 West 53d Street in 1939 in a short, white building by Edward Durrell Stone and Philip Goodwin, who had designed the facility in a style now known as "international." By 1964 the need for more exhibition space became pressing, so Philip Johnson was hired to design an extension, known as the East Wing. By the late 1970s it became apparent that MOMA needed much more space, since only 15 percent of its collections could be shown at one time, and since its acquisition pace had quickened with the advent of new styles, such as Pop, Hyper-Realist, Conceptualist, Minimalist, and Op, all of which were encouraged by Abstract Expressionism.
In the words of William Rubin director of MOMA's Department of Painting and Sculpture, one of five such departments, "The major share of other new space will be devoted to the art made since the beginning of World War II: American Abstract Expressionism and the European Expressionism of Bacon and Dubuffet." Anyone who has toured the rooms hung with immense canvases by Motherwell, Rothko, Gottlieb, Still, and Pollock, not to mention Rauschenberg, Johns, and their other successors, will see the need for more space.
Argentine-born Cesar Pelli, for years the dean of Yale's architecture school, was selected to design the new MOMA, and he has done so in a three-pronged assault on the site. The first includes the total renovation of the existing buildings, which clearly needed work, the complete redesign of the Garden Wing, which faces on 54th Street, and the erection of a new West Wing, which begins with six floors of spacious exhibition and office space as well as a forty-four-story condo tower intended to blend in with nearby skyscrapers of CBS, ABC, Warner Communication, Tishman, and MGM. The results are happily very successful, for the interior of MOMA now is full of light, the flow of circulation is enhanced by a new floor plan and the inclusion of open-air escalators, and the northern façade is rather like an atrium. It is known as the Garden Hall.
Thirty percent of the 70,000 items in the collection are now expected to be available for viewing at any one
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