A space of artistic grace

Nearly a decade ago, the Museum of Modern Art began planning to expand its cramped collection of buildings on 53rd Street in Manhattan -- the fifth such effort since the Modern was founded in 1929. It came at a time when the world of architecture, particularly museum architecture, was feeling the first rumblings of what turned out be a tectonic shift. Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum was nearing completion in Bilbao, and word soon spread that no matter what filled the galleries, the shimmering, otherworldly building was bound to become a destination in its own right.

While the idea of museums using cutting-edge architecture to attract attention and visitors was hardly new -- Frank Lloyd Wright’s original Guggenheim, after all, opened in 1959 -- in the years that followed there was practically a stampede among museum boards to commission bold, photogenic designs. And whatever they might tell you now, the leaders of the Modern at least flirted with the idea of doing the same. They invited architects known for daring form-making, including Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron, to join their early rounds of conceptual planning. But in the end they gave the expansion job to Yoshio Taniguchi, a relatively obscure Japanese architect known for a crisp, quiet style.

If Taniguchi’s shortage of big-city, big-budget experience made him a gamble seven years ago, he now looks, to the museum’s great credit, like the most obvious choice in the world. The new Modern, which opens to the public Saturday after a $425-million, 2 1/2 -year makeover, represents an elegant return to the museum’s first principles, a fresh take on the themes -- discipline, purity, restraint -- that so inspired its founding director, Alfred Barr Jr. It is also a fully contemporary piece of architecture; it joins recent examples by Renzo Piano, Kazuyo Sejima and others in helping guide the profession away from 1990s-style flamboyance and toward a kind of delicate, weightless immateriality.

More than anything, the new Modern is a singular example of architectural poise. Taniguchi’s design balances compressed and soaring spaces, inside and out, light and dark, new and old, movement and repose. There is no posturing here, formally or conceptually, no evident angst about the institution’s place in the city and the world. A museum architect who is the son of a museum architect, Taniguchi has instead calmly confronted the considerable architectural and curatorial issues that plagued the Modern at the end of the 20th century. Of course, it helps that he and the executive architects, Kohn Pedersen Fox, have been given nearly half a billion dollars to complete the job; this sort of simplicity is never cheap.

Unlike most of New York’s major museums, from the Met to the Whitney, the Modern doesn’t have its entrance on one of Manhattan’s broad avenues. This fact has long complicated the museum’s feelings about what kind of face to show the public. Its original building along 53rd Street, finished in 1939 and designed by a young Edward Durell Stone with Philip Goodwin, is a modestly successful example of the same International Style architecture that the museum had helped popularize with its landmark 1932 exhibition on the subject.

Over the years, the museum expanded haltingly across a collection of linked pieces of property. In 1951, Philip Johnson designed an annex to the west, which was later demolished. He added a sculpture garden to the north, backing up to 54th Street, in 1953 and another building to the east of Stone and Goodwin’s original in 1964. Two decades after that, Cesar Pelli added a 52-story condominium tower atop a banally efficient series of escalators enclosed by an atrium overlooking Johnson’s garden.

The museum then settled into a period during which it operated as the antithesis of what Bilbao would later represent: Visitors came to view the unparalleled collection, not its container. You rarely saw groups posing for photographs out front, the way they still clamor to do in front of the Guggenheim and the Met. So when the Modern was able in 1995 to acquire the old Dorset Hotel at 30 W. 54th St. and two adjacent townhouses, it was perhaps inevitable that it would explore not just an expansion but a reinvention, driven by architecture.

Taniguchi’s boldest step has been to open up the museum to the surrounding skyline even as he has connected it more solidly at ground level to the street grid. He has given new exposure to the Modern’s 54th Street facade, which used to feel solely like the back of the house. The museum now has entrances on both streets, leading through simple revolving doors to a lobby that can be used as a shortcut between 53rd and 54th and doesn’t require a ticket to the museum.

On the 53rd Street side, New Yorkers can get a sense of the architectural history of the Modern in a single glance. Taniguchi’s own facade, in black glass and granite, sits precisely next to the base of Pelli’s tower, which is connected to the restored Goodwin and Stone building and finally to Johnson’s thin, dark 1964 wing.

The 54th Street facade, by contrast, is all Taniguchi. Two wings, each shaded by a deep, squared-off portico, now face one another across the garden. One side, to the west, holds the new galleries, while the other contains offices and the education department. Each wing is sheathed in a perfectly transparent, remarkably delicate-looking glass wall. The overall effect combines monumentality with ethereality. Only the blank, low wall that divides the garden from the 54th Street sidewalk seems wrong here, with none of the grace that marks the rest of Taniguchi’s composition.

Taniguchi even manages to make the Pelli tower seem like part of the museum again, both because it stands at the center of the new museum and because Taniguchi’s palette complements Pelli’s dark glass. Those gestures toward Pelli represent an ironic kind of architectural generosity. It was Pelli who designed the World Financial Center complex in Lower Manhattan, at the feet of the World Trade Center. When they were finished in 1988, his four squat towers helped bring the World Trade Center back into conversation with the rest of the skyline. Now, in making Pelli’s Modern tower look substantially less aloof, Taniguchi has managed to return the favor.

Some of this savvy urbanism comes as a surprise. Taniguchi’s museums in Japan, even the ones in cities, sit for the most part as objects in space, surrounded by water, gardens and sky. In isolation they are the slightest bit bland. Their precise forms and perfect posture can look overly formal, like a soldier in a starched uniform standing by himself in a field.

Of the half-dozen museums by Taniguchi that I’ve seen, only the 1991 building in Marugame, dedicated to the work of a single artist, Genichiro Inokuma, offers a hint of what he has been able to accomplish in Manhattan. The facade is made of up of a huge portico, in this case hooding a huge wall featuring one of Inokuma’s primitivist murals, with the entrance tucked away discreetly. It is a spare but strikingly effective urban arrangement, and it must have been among the designs that pushed the Modern’s trustees into Taniguchi’s corner.

Inside and out, though, Taniguchi’s Museum of Modern Art is both bigger and airier than any of his previous work. The interior, especially, joins soaring spaces with an overriding sense of lightness. Whether you arrive from 54th or 53rd street, the lobby of the new Modern stretches in front of you as a long and remarkably plain room, decorated only by two desks to buy tickets, which are topped by flowers in glass vases. The ceiling, propped by a single row of white columns, is intentionally low -- a decompression zone between the street and the art.

Light filtering in from the east draws you in that direction, and when you turn, you see the garden behind a curtain wall of glass. There are just a handful of artworks in this space, but they’ve been chosen very specifically to shed light on the relationship between art and architecture in the new building. As you climb four steps toward the garden, you see, first, Miro’s horizontal “Mural Painting” and Rodin’s 1898 sculpture of Balzac. Then, out in the garden but clearly part of this same group, appears Claes Oldenburg’s pure white Geometric Mouse.

At this point you have reached the base of the glass wall, and you are forced -- well, persuaded -- by the architecture to pivot to the right and climb a stair to the second floor. You can double back and take one of the elevators, if you want. (They’re tucked away behind a plain white wall; escalators begin on the second level.) But Taniguchi is banking that since he has already delivered you to the foot of the stair, you are probably going to climb it.

Unlike some recent museum projects by prominent architects -- Zaha Hadid’s Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati and Tod Williams and Billie Tsien’s American Folk Art Museum, next door to the Modern on 53rd Street, both come to mind -- Taniguchi doesn’t make a fetish of his stairs. But they offer a good perch from which to appreciate his design.

As you walk up, you notice Arthur Young’s Bell helicopter suspended above, and you begin to get a full sense of the huge atrium that hovers above you. This is the most dramatic space, soaring to the sixth floor of the new gallery wing, crossed by thin walkways and punched through with square openings. High-ceilinged spaces for contemporary art open off the atrium on the second floor.

Three floors of galleries for the permanent collection are stacked above; they are surprisingly traditional, with oak floors and plain, aluminum-paneled doorways. And if they feel cramped and overstuffed, that is more a measure of the curators’ eagerness to show off the Modern’s almost unfathomable depth in 20th century paintings than a weakness in the architecture. Still, it has to be said that these rooms, at the very heart of the museum, are substantially less inspiring as designed spaces than the rest of the building. A dramatic, loft-like gallery on the sixth floor holds temporary exhibitions.

The connective spaces in the upper floors are complex, and they offer repeated glimpses of the streets outside, the garden and the interior of the museum. But in a way, the sequence that guides you from the lobby to the second floor suggests all that you need to know about Taniguchi’s makeover. It heightens your awareness of your own body moving deliberately through the building. It gives you a sense of the expanded garden and the cityscape looming behind. It lures you through painting and sculpture to transportation design -- from the 19th and 20th centuries toward the 21st. It passes by Balzac standing solidly on his two feet and then, as if egged on by the helicopter, takes architectural flight.

Like a fractal, this brief walk neatly matches the whole of Taniguchi’s new Modern. It delivers you into the thick of canonical modern art, and back again, without so much as breaking a sweat.