MOMA adrift

• Published in: The New Criterion Vol. 32; no. 9; p. 1
• Main Author: Lewis, Michael J
• Format: Trade Publication Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Foundation for Cultural Review 01.05.2014
• ISSN: 0734-0222; 2163-6265

By June it will be too late, according to the Museum of Modern Art, which is razing the building in the course of its new expansion campaign. Since the announcement came at the start of the year, MOMA has drawn what are surely the most uniformly negative headlines in its history: "A Museum That Has Lost Its Way" (The Wall Street Journal), "The Museum with a Bulldozer's Heart" (The New York Times), "MOMA Loses Face" (The New York Review of Books), "This Is How You Ruin a Cultural Institution" (New Republic), and-most pithily-"Please Save Modernism from the Modern" (Design Observer). [...]Williams and Tsien used the same north-facing light monitor and thickly textured walls (limestone rather than bronze) in their Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, the most lavish of the many commissions to come their way as a result of their sudden celebrity. (If one counts the Folk Art Museum's facade, that makes two flayed skins). Because of its open plan and lack of an emblematic sculptural form, MOMA was able to change its form drastically without serious objection. Furthering the theme of spatial flow will be an "Art Bay" on the site of the Folk Art Museum, with a retractable glass wall that can open the gallery to the outdoors for public performances-the ultimate in architectural transparency.