A Building on Its Best Behavior
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Get used to the words like “transcendent aesthetic experience” in describing the Modern’s new home, because we will all be hearing a good deal of that sort of thing in the days to come. Surely there is much to praise in the new complex. But the main reason for these imputations of transcendence, as far as I can make out, is that the architect, Yoshio Taniguchi, is from Japan. And, as we all know, they are so much more spirutal over there than we are in the West.
But that is not the only bit of humbug that needs to be fumigated out of the new premises. Through no fault of the institution itself, there is an irritating ceremoniousness to the whole affair. Every element of the museum’s conception, from the flooring to the signage, seems gravid with high-mindedness, as though the stakes could not be higher, as though the very future of visual culture, the precarious majesty of the entire canon, hung upon the decision to place a Soutine beside a Vlaminck or a Warhol in the stairwell. Without denying the eminence of the Modern or the likely impact that some of its decisions are apt to have upon a servile art world, let us remember that it is merely a museum of artifacts, most of which are fewer than a century old.
As for the man of the hour, Mr. Taniguchi is a 67-year-old, Harvard-educated native of Tokyo. A summary assessment – made possible not only by this latest work, but also those documented in the accompanying exhibition “Yoshio Taniguchi: Nine Museums” – would be as follows: He is an architect of exquisite but not infallible taste, a man far richer in judgment and equilibrated tact than in audacity or imagination. In this respect he can be viewed as the anti-Frank Gehry, who is all imagination and nothing else.
There is a great deal of continuity between the new Modern and the eight other museums Taniguchi has designed, all of them in Japan. Indeed, it is almost comical to find the same shapes and materials recurring like leitmotifs throughout his career, irrespective of the shifting contexts. The overhanging eaves, for example, that are the most pronounced features of the three garden facades at the Modern recur with little variation in two previous museums.
As far as I know, there is only one significant curve in his entire career, and it is not to be found anywhere among the regimented grids and austere right angles that make up the new Modern. His palette tends to be a composite of muted grays, beiges, and off-whites, his materials industrial-strength concrete and corrugated aluminum – though, to be sure, these materials have probably never before been fashioned into anything as effetely elegant as his nine museums.
But there is one crucial difference between the Modern and all of Mr. Taniguchi’s other work: The latter are essentially flat and autonomous campuses that arise from scratch and sprawl across a suburban setting. The Modern emerges in an urban context and, even more importantly, incorporates preexistent structures by Edward Durrell Stone, Phillip Johnson, and Cesar Pelli, that have accrued over the institution’s 75-year history. You have only to look at the 53rd-street facade to see that is has become a ungainly patchwork of high modernist rectitude in its several forms.
There are two immediate consequences of this urban context. The first is that all sorts of interesting thing start to happen as the museum’s geometric patterns play off the gridded crazy-quilt of Midtown. The second is that the totality of Mr. Taniguchi’s museum is necessarily compromised from the start. The Modern never achieves that sense of rigorous consistency that his Japanese museums possess. Instead you have almost a three ring circus of competing austerities that are often compromised by the pre-existent building stock. It was said of Fred Astaire that he could dance with a broomstick and make the broomstick look good; if he had tried that with Cesar Pelli’s 50-story tower, as Mr. Taniguchi has had to do, all bets would be off.
Mr. Taniguchi’s achievement therefore consists in an incremental triumph of small details, rather than in an immediate and unified sense of harmony or anything else. Architectonically, the boldest part of the museum is the six-story atrium. Urbanistically, it is a pleasure to walk through the lobby to 54th street, suddenly accessible as a small point of daylight in the distance. It is to be regretted, however, that the low-lying lobby creates a distinctly diminished effect and that the atrium reveals itself only after you have progressed some distance into the structure.
Beyond that, the pleasure of the building will be found in the fritten glass of the facade, the white oak floors of the galleries, and the Georgia marble in the garden. Despite the vanguardist origins of the Modern, it always has had corporate money of the highest pedigree behind it, and it shows here. As you walk through these galleries, it is impossible to ignore the sheer capital it took to join all the costly pieces together and to do so with such craftsmanship.
Indeed, you feel you should be on your best behavior in the new space, something you never felt at the temporary home that Michael Maltzan designed for MoMA Queens. And you have only to recall that misbegotten building to understand how lucky we are, all things considered, to have the Modern back in Manhattan.