For its new home away from home, MoMA bought the old Swingline stapler factory, typical of the industrial buildings that make up the neighborhood. Maltzan calls this a “middle landscape”–not unlike the grungier parts of Los Angeles. Clearly, MoMA was aware of the success of L.A.’s Temporary Contemporary, designed in 1983 in an old parking garage in Little Tokyo by Frank Gehry (for whom Maltzan once worked), while the Museum of Contemporary Art was being built. The T.C. became too popular to close, though MoMA says its new place will shut. Meanwhile the museum is counting on a fair share of its audience to take the subway to Queens, where the experience begins. As the No. 7 train nears the museum’s stop on an elevated track, a group of huge rooftop letters appear to snap into alignment to read MoMA. Down at street level, you can’t miss the place–Maltzan’s painted it bright blue. Once through the glass doors, you can move up a ramp–to a little cafe and bookshop on a balcony–or down another to the galleries. Nothing fancy here–the floors are scarred gray concrete like the sidewalk; the high ceilings show the pipes and ducts. It’s unpretentious, and those ramps and curving walls invite you to keep moving.
Of course, the payoff is the art. For the opening, a greatest-hits show hangs in the loftlike galleries. All those priceless MoMA paintings–Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon,” van Gogh’s “Starry Night”–look fresh in these downscale spaces. The building was designed–with Cooper, Robertson & Partners–to revert to art storage in 2005. But who knows if it will entirely close to the public?
Maltzan recalls something the museum’s legendary founder, Alfred Barr, once wrote about MoMA as a speeding bullet, or torpedo, leading the charge of modernism. He says he wanted his design to convey the idea of “trajectory, movement, change.” It’s been a long time since MoMA seemed on the leading edge, but now at least, it’s earned some street cred.
