A Jolt of the Modernist Spirit

NEW YORK--When New York’s Museum of Modern Art first opened its doors on the 12th floor of a Fifth Avenue office building in 1929, it marked the beginning of a bold adventure. Modern art was fresh and vigorous, and the museum’s brash founding director, Alfred Barr, had a mission: to bring Modernism to a still semi-provincial America. Seventy-three years later, Modernism is the language of the cultural establishment, powerful as ever but no longer threatening.

The new Museum of Modern Art in Queens, which opens to the public Saturday, is a momentary return to that earlier revolutionary spirit. The project is only temporary. It will function as MoMA’s home while construction continues on an $800-million expansion of the museum’s 53rd Street campus in Manhattan. Museum officials expect to convert it to storage space after the main campus reopens, sometime between late 2004 and spring 2005. With a $2.5-million price tag and 25,000 square feet of exhibition space, MoMA QNS cannot compare in scale or ambition with the main project--a refined glass-and-steel composition by the Japanese Modernist Yoshio Taniguchi that will cover nearly a city block.

But the modesty of MoMA QNS is part of its appeal. Designed by Los Angeles-based Michael Maltzan, the project is conceived as a delicately drawn architectural narrative--a series of visual bread crumbs that pulls visitors along an unfamiliar landscape, then deposits them in a womb-like space packed with artistic treasures.

The result is a museum that engenders a remarkable sense of intimacy between art and viewer and acts as a pointed challenge to the monumental museum projects that have become ubiquitous in the past decade. In its populist spirit, it is closer to Los Angeles projects like Frank Gehry’s Geffen Contemporary--a gaping warehouse space built in the ethnic enclave of Little Tokyo in 1983--than to the typical, more refined Manhattan museum.

Not surprisingly, many Manhattanites have already complained about the site of the temporary MoMA. Twenty minutes from midtown, it seems too far. Its location, a barren landscape of factories and warehouses, seems too dirty.

In fact, MoMA’s choice was an inspired one. During the last two decades, the skyrocketing cost of Manhattan real estate has significantly altered the contours of the New York art world. While downtown art dealers have relocated from the raw, unpolished lofts of SoHo to grander digs in Chelsea, many artists have been forced to flee Manhattan for the outer boroughs.

In bringing MoMA to Queens, the museum was clearly seeking to bring art closer to that emerging cultural nexus. With its brooding industrial buildings, the low, horizontal urban landscape of Long Island City is a soothing antidote to the rampant consumption and mind-bending visual noise that is making the big city less palatable to the creative community. The industrial shed, meanwhile, has been a symbol of artistic production since the rise of Pop art and Minimalism in the 1960s.

Maltzan’s design shows a keen understanding of that context. Its narrative structure is loosely divided into three acts. The first begins on the No. 7 line from Manhattan. Arriving along the elevated tracks, visitors first glimpse the museum via a series of fragmented white letters painted on large black plywood boxes mounted on the building’s roof. As the train approaches the station, the forms seem to slide into place until they spell out M-o-M-A, and then fragment again as the train pulls to a stop.

That visual game continues at street level, where a 150-foot bar of fluorescent lights extends along the building’s blue surface, drawing visitors to the main entry. There the MoMA QNS logo appears again, emblazoned over the facade and partially etched into its sliding glass doors. When the doors open, the letters temporarily break apart, echoing the rooftop forms.

The overall effect is mesmerizing. Maltzan has created the museum’s identity out of almost nothing--some paint, some boxes, a few fluorescent lamps. But these elements are delicately woven through the city’s existing texture. As they dissolve in and out of view, they act as a subtle commentary on the museum’s temporary status.

Act Two occurs in the museum’s lobby, where the pace of that narrative suddenly accelerates. Visitors first go up a short series of shallow stairs, where a view opens up into the main galleries through a narrow gap between two walls. The lobby then turns sharply to the left, splitting into two parallel paths. A narrow flight of stairs leads up to a cafe at mezzanine level; another path slips along the base of the mezzanine, passing the coat-check area and leading to the ticket counter in back.

It is here that Maltzan’s light touch and compositional prowess are on full display--and the space is taut with energy. Along one side, the gently curved form of the cafe rail extends toward the back of the lobby, where it drops back down to follow the line of a ramp that deposits visitors in front of the ticket counter. On the other side, the path is framed by the cantilevered wall of the Project Space gallery, whose form seems to crash through the space and loom over the ticket counter in back. As these lines and forms converge, the space seems to tighten around you, and the mind begins to release outside distractions.

Maltzan says the lobby’s design was partly influenced by the 1939 New York World’s Fair Pavilion designed by Finnish architect Alvar Aalto. Like Aalto’s, Maltzan’s work has a humanist bent. His spaces tend toward the fluid and tranquil, not the brash and aggressive. But at MoMA QNS, Maltzan has discovered a new edginess. In many ways, the lobby’s design is closer in spirit to the work of the 1920s-era Russian Constructivists, whose dynamic buildings were meant to reflect the relentless forward motion of a revolutionary culture. Like El Lissitzky’s Suprematist “Prouns”--theoretical buildings that floated in the atmosphere--Maltzan’s cantilevered gallery lunges out into space, a wedge pointed aggressively toward the future.

The relentless sense of movement could easily have taken on the aura of an assembly line--with armies of automatons marching to the beat of the cultural drums. Maltzan avoids that kind of claustrophobic effect with a subtle layering of imagery. Carefully framed views open up from the lobby into the galleries. A video camera projects an image of feet shuffling down a Manhattan street onto the side of the Project Space. The floor of the gallery is partially cut away so ticket buyers can peer up through a video screen at visitors milling around inside.

The idea is to give the audience visual cues about what is coming up--to break down the barrier between art and life, as if the creative forces packed inside were leaking out into the everyday world. But by splicing together a series of seemingly disconnected images--art, video, architecture--Maltzan creates a cinematic effect, one that imbues the space with a surprising sense of weightlessness.

That progression only breaks down as visitors proceed to the final act, the main exhibition space. Maltzan did not design these spaces, and the transition between the lobby and the galleries is somewhat abrupt. The route from the ticket counter slips along the back of the Project Space gallery and then runs into a long partition. At that point there is a slight hesitation before continuing in either of two directions. More critical, however, the wall partitions run right up to the ceiling, interrupting the sense of visual flow that is a critical theme of the design.

Nonetheless, the rooms are generously scaled, and they retain the feeling of accessibility that is a hallmark of warehouse galleries. Raw and unpolished, they allow the art to completely take over. Picasso’s 1907 “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” seems to pop off the wall. The sensuality of a carved wood figure by Alberto Giacometti is so palpable that you are tempted to caress its surface. The viewer’s relationship to these objects seems almost casual.

However beautiful the new Taniguchi-designed MoMA turns out, it will demand a different relationship between viewer and art. With 135,000 square feet of exhibition space, compared with MoMA QNS’ 25,000, it will be an overwhelming experience, an endless enfilade filled with great works and packed with gaping tourists. As such, it is unlikely to evoke the feeling of private joy that one is capable of in Queens.

Maltzan seems to have intuitively understood this. And that sense of partaking in a small, cherished moment is as true of his architecture as it is of the art. It is in that sense that the design is closest in spirit to Aalto’s 1939 pavilion or Frederick Kiesler’s 1925 “City in Space”--New York projects that were demolished within a year of their construction but that continue to hold a mystical place in the minds of architects.

Most likely, when MoMA QNS is gone, years from now, it will play a similar role in the collective memory. As such, it is sure to boost Maltzan’s reputation as a fluent--and important--talent.