MoMA

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is a collection of important buildings located on 53rd St in New York that have been artfully combined into a single gallery by Yoshio Taniguchi in 2004.

The importance of the gallery to architecture has a long history. Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson curated the exhibition ‘Modern Architecture: International Exhibition’ in 1932 which bought European Modernism to a wide audience in America. In the title of the touring exhibition and accompanying book the phrase ‘The International Style’ was coined by Hitchcock and Johnson. MoMA then constructed Americas first International Style Building in 1939.

Philip Johnson was the first director of the museum’s department of architecture until 1934 and constructed the sculpture garden and a new wing in 1954. Cesar Pelli built a 53-storey residential tower on top of the museum in 1984 which provided funding for the museum’s growth.

In 2004 Yoshio Taniguchi created a major expansion of the museum spaces and integrated the existing buildings into the enormous gallery that MoMA is today. The restrained geometries and materiality of the neThe Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is a collection of important buildings located on 53rd St in New York that have been artfully combined into a single gallery.

The gallery has successfully expanded and reinforced it’s importance as a leading world gallery and is an excellent example of the way buildings can respond to contemporary needs and requirements for expansion whilst maintaining the best of it’s various original buildings through innovative ways of bringing them together.