Word: pelli
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...more than doubled, from 40,500 sq. ft. in the old building to 87,500 sq. ft. in the new. Circulation, conservation, storage, office space: all needed improvement and most have got it, at a total project cost of about $55 million. The appointed architect was Cesar Pelli, dean of the School of Architecture at Yale. Construction began...
Radical though the changes have been, the word hardly applies to Pelli's 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...
...this difficult task, Pelli proved an excellent choice. His signature material is glass, and he is one of the very few 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...
...only ostensible reference to another building in Pelli's design is perhaps the glass-sheathed escalator bank grafted onto the museum's north wall, overlooking the sculpture garden, which distantly recalls the glass escalator tube on the face of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. But whereas the Pompidou's tube is a mere people mover, MOMA's moving staircases work in a celebratory space, full of light and air. The view through the glass as one mounts and descends can only sharpen the pleasurable contrast between nature and culture that was the point of Philip Johnson...
...death in 1950 at the age of 76, the academy's influence spread through the work of Eero and a number of students and associates who became some of the country's leading planners and architects, among them Edmund Bacon, Carl Feiss, Harry Weese, Cesar Pelli, Kevin Roche, Ralph Rapson, Gunnar Birkerts and E. Charles Bassett...