Word: moma
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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There is no fonder acronym in art than MOMA, as this 55-year-old institution has long been known. One cannot imagine New York City, or modernism itself, without it. More than any other museum in the world, MOMA is identified with its subject and defines its history. It was not the intention of Alfred Barr (1902-1981), the first director and ideological shaper of the museum, to create a Louvre for something that seemed, in 1929, as vulnerable and problematic as modern art. Nevertheless, that was what happened. One cannot open a periodical without being told, yet again, that...
Before Barr, the idea of dedicating a whole museum to modernism as a culture, embracing design, photography, architecture and film, as well as painting and sculpture, had not emerged. At its origins, MOMA was intended as a constantly unfolding encyclopedia of the new. No institution can remain on that kind of cutting edge forever, and by the 1970s MOMA was muffled in its own success. All its departments had well-funded rivals in museums across the country. By 1980 modern art was an industry, involving hundreds of thousands of people. In the face of such expansion, MOMA became more preoccupied...
...MOMA had to expand. It also had to find a different financial base. Both these matters, when embodied in a plan that was made public in 1976, caused some livery controversy. To get more money, the museum came up with the idea of a 44-story tower of luxury apartments, an unprecedented step for a tax-exempt institution that, in the view of Architecture Critic Ada Louise Huxtable, proved "the most artful real estate deal ever devised." Reckoning in the six floors that constitute the base of the tower but belong to the museum, the exhibition space has now more...
...design. When the original museum structure, by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durrell Stone, opened in 1939, the architectural tone of 53rd Street-and of midtown Manhattan in general-was set by brownstones, mansions and beaux-arts commercial buildings. It was a world of rich, plum-pudding surfaces. When MOMA raised its polemic International Style façade of glass and polished marble, with those futuristic Swiss-cheese holes in the roof canopy, it looked apparitional. But now the context has shifted again. Thanks to the competitive urges of developers, the very idea of the glass tower has acquired a bluster...
...architects who can still squeeze some poetic drops from the overworked convention of the curtain wall. Basically, he does this by playing down the frame of mullions and spandrels and emphasizing the wall's nature as a pictorial surface, a sheet rilled with color patches and reflections. MOMA'S street façades, sheathed in blue-gray and white glass, extend and echo the window bands of the 1939 facade on the lower floors; and when the tower takes off into the sky, it does so with a degree of sober deliberation-story by story, as it were...