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About Museum Tower, 15 West 53rd Street
This tall condominium tower was created as part of a major expansion in 1985 of the Museum of Modern Art, or MOMA as it is known.
Architect Cesar Pelli's 1985 reconstruction of the museum to accommodate the new high-rise condominium apartment tower to the west incorporated a major expansion and redesign of the museum. The mixed-use expansion worked quite well visually from the garden where it cascaded downward from the tower rather like an angled, as opposed to bulbous, Beaubourg Museum.
One critic, Vincent Scully, however, was not amused: "...the flapping piece of flashing with which it is tenuously connected to the roof of the older building can hardly be credited," adding, in his book "American Architecture and Urbanism," revised edition, 1988, Henry Holt and Company, that the tower's "bulk severely compromises the privacy and scale of the sculpture court behind it...." Actually, the cascading skylights referred to by Scully bear a remarkable similarity to famous treatments by architect James Stirling and are the best feature of the Pelli expansion.
Ten years later, the museum announced it would be expanding again and had acquired the adjacent Dorset Hotel on West 54th Street and some other low-rise properties.
In December, 1997, the museum announced it had chosen an expansion plan by Yoshio Taniguchi, a not-well-known Japanese architect who had been one of ten finalists in a competition.
Taniguchi's design affected the base of Museum Tower by redesigning part of its façade on 53rd Street and removing Pelli's cascading glass atrium in the museum overlooking its famous garden. By removing the atrium, the tower had a more pronounced interface with, and higher visibility from, the world-famous garden, perhaps the most beloved and best urban space in the city.
While the Tanigucui new expansion cause some disruption for residents of the tower, the removal of the atrium did not affect them as they did not have direct access to it.
Inside the museum, however, the Pelli tower expansion was pathetic and a major disappointment as the low ceilings and Scandinavian-style minimalism simply appeared cheap, which was all the more infuriating given the incredible personal wealth of the museum's board of trustees.
The museum was founded in 1929 by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller [the wife of John D. Rockefeller Jr.], Lillie B. Bliss and Mrs. Cornelius J. Sullivan. The museum first opened in relatively small offices on the 12th floor in the former Heckscher Building (now the Crown Building) on the southwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street.)
It can be argued that the low ceilings of the broad 53rd Street entrance can be tolerated because once past the admission takers the space opens up to the large windows facing directly on the great garden. Nonsense! The crass commercialism of the cashiers and the large information desk should have been crowded together with the rather nice coat check area and the low entrance area at least kept open to appear to be more inviting with gracious vistas of the garden. The area directly in front of the garden from the entrance also was given over to escalators and were always busy given the museum's deserved popularity. In good weather, of course, such petty objections are superfluous as the glories of the garden are self-evident and need no promotion.
The new Taniguchi plan called for a major new 110-foot-high atrium on 54th Street and connections through to 53rd Street where the museum's famous existing façades will be preserved.
A lovable Picasso animal sculpture used to grace the entrance hall, but was removed during blockbuster exhibitions when the lobby takes on the bustling atmosphere of a subway station and is only missing a three-card monte game.
The mid-block Museum Tower, which has a sumptuous but conventionally luxurious modern entrance of its own, has nice proportions, but has been sited in probably the worst spot on the site as far as casting shadows on the famous garden. When I raised this issue and suggested that the tower would have been placed on the 54th Street side of the site, I was told that studies had been made and that it would not cast shadows. They were wrong and I was right, although all the civic activists, who would later make much of shadows in the public debate over the redevelopment of the New York Coliseum on Columbus Circle, declined to take up the issue, perhaps in cowardly deference to the prestige of the museum's board.
Pelli's tower had been one of the city's most anticipated architectural projects in the 1980's as he had designed the great abstract and colorful shapes of a design center in Los Angeles and was the master architect for the mammoth World Financial Center at Battery Park City with its magnificent Wintergarden.
When the museum first showed renderings of Pelli's expansion, the tower promised to be very delicate and interesting because Pelli emphasized that 14 different colors would be employed on its glass curtain walls. The horizontal banding of the curtain walls defers nicely to the original Goodwin/Stone façade, but the rendering suggested a Mondrianesque patterning because of the different colors. Sadly, it is very hard for the naked eye to discern much variation in the blues and greens that were installed. Indeed, it is very hard to believe there are 14 different colors on the tower.
The tower itself is finely proportioned and many apartments on its upper floors facing north have views of Central Park. Despite the bustle of crowds attending the museum, the tower's residential entrance is considerably removed from the museum's main entrance and is very handsome and discrete and impressive. Such an address offers considerable prestige because of the association with the famed museum.
The museum desperately needed to expand and the interior expansion works relatively well in terms of circulation and visitors are not aware when they have wandered into portions of exhibition space contained within the Pelli tower. With rare exception, however, MOMA's expanded galleries in the tower are cheap in their finish and embarrassingly low-ceilinged.
The museum of course, could have brought up most of the rest of the block to the west, which has been lying fallow for some time since the Museum of American Folk Art has not bothered to build a great skyscraper designed for it by Emilio Ambasz, a former head of the Museum of Modern Art's Department of Architecture, who certainly should have been considered by the Modern Museum for any expansion, but was not. More shocking, the folk art museum announced in 1997 that it was proceeding with a low-rise structure by other architects on its site. That museum's building, however, turned out to be one of the most attractive and interesting small post-war buildings in the city.
MOMA's gift shop and bookstore, in the black Johnson annex to the east of the main entrance, fortunately can be entered directly from the museum lobby as well as from the street. The bookstore, which also sells posters and cards, is quite good and the downstairs gift store is pleasant and not quite as overwhelming as its large annex that opened in the late 1980s across the street at 40 West 53rd Street. While modest in scale, Johnson's annex is one of his finest designs: sleek, powerful and quite articulate. It is an excellent counterpoint to the white-and-gray main building especially with its rounded steel window frames complementing the port-holed roof canopy of the original building, and its façade and generous proportions make it a classic in the league of the far larger Seagram Building and Lever House a few blocks away on Park Avenue.
Johnson had also designed a similar small wing for the west side of the museum that was replaced by the new Pelli tower.
Taniguchi's new design, however, inexcusably removed the garden-facing façade of Johnson's annex, again with nary a peep from the city's preservation community.
Essentially, this is a minimalist factory façade, enlivened by the fine roof canopy that unfortunately is not highly visible from the sidewalk, and the museum's fine tradition of hanging colorful banners. The perforated roof canopy covers a pleasant, small terrace accessible only to museum members.
The museum's art, however, overwhelms most of the quibbles. The collection has dazzling landmark paintings by Matisse, Picasso, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Miro, Picabia and Rousseau and covers Cubism, Fauvism and Surrealism authoritatively and has by no means neglected modern sculpture. Its design, architecture, photography and film departments have consistently set international standards.
In 1993, the museum decided to begin to reintroduce less than minimal frames for some of its great paintings. It had followed the very bad example of the Guggenheim Museum in stripping away frames from almost all its paintings. Perhaps it is slowly regaining its aesthetic senses. Some paintings, a few, look good without a frame. Of course, there are good frames and bad frames, but that's another story....
The museum clearly needs much larger and better galleries and an even larger garden. The garden, hopefully, could be expanded to the east where it could end in a series of terraces.
In 1994, the museum, which is closed Wednesday and open late on Thursdays when visitors may pay whatever they wish for admission, created a 54th Street entrance to Sette MOMA, a restaurant that fronts on the east end of the garden, which recently underwent another unnecessary and badly executed rearrangement and reshuffling of its sculptures.
The glory of the museum, at least from an architectural viewpoint, is its garden, widely considered, justifiably, as the finest oasis in the city. Although it has been modified often, it remains serenely elegant. Architect Philip Johnson and landscape architect James Fanning created the city's most justly celebrated garden in 1964 on the 54th Street side of the through-block site.
The original 1939 museum building on the site by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durrell Stone building with its punched-out roof canopy is one of the landmarks of the International Style movement and Bauhaus design. Over the years, it has been modified only slightly: large panes of clear glass replaced glass blocks at the 53rd Street entrance.
Its expansive white marble façade, delightful and breezy perforated top and its large banners have always been refreshing, a surprisingly, for New York, presence of cleanly modern simplicity of fine proportion, correctly scaled to its mid-block location and sufficiently understated to be good-neighborly to the townhouse environment when it was erected.
It has fortunately survived and is now wedged between two very dissimilar major structures: Philip Johnson's black steel and black glass extension to the east and Cesar Pelli's multi-colored glass Museum Tower to the west.
The Goodwin/Stone main building is not as aesthetically pleasing as Johnson's annex, although historically it is quite important.
As a student at Harvard University, Johnson was introduced by his sister, Theodate, to a professor at Wellesley College, Alfred H. Barr Jr., who subsequently became the first director of MOMA. In a few years, Johnson teamed up with Henry-Russell Hitchcock to coordinate a major architecture exhibition at MOMA and write a book on the International Style in 1932, after which Johnson was named chairman of a new department of architecture at the museum.
After completing a guest house for Blanchette Rockefeller (Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III) on East 52nd Street that was the first building in the city designed in the style of Mies van der Rohe, Johnson's idol, Johnson was commissioned to build, in 1950, a 7-story annex to MOMA, just to the west of the Goodwin/Stone building on a site occupied by a townhouse designed by C. P. H. Gilbert at 21 West 53rd Street. This black steel and glass building was described by an associate as "the first all-glass building front in Manhattan," and was a precursor to another Johnson-designed annex on the east side of the Goodwin/Stone building, in 1964. The western building was subsequently designated the Grace Rainey Rogers Memorial. (An auditorium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is also named after her.)
At the same time as Johnson was planning the western annex, MOMA was entering discussions with The Whitney Museum of American Art that had recently acquired property behind it on 54th Street. The Whitney was moving uptown from its elegant and handsome building on West Eighth Street in Greenwich Village. The Rockefeller family, meanwhile, wanted a memorial to Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr.), who had died in 1948, and it decided to build a new garden at MOMA.
The original garden had been laid out mostly by John McAndrew and Alfred Barr, according to Franz Schulze, the author of "Philip Johnson, Life and Work," a superb biography published in 1994 by the University of Chicago Press. It had been asymmetrical with freestanding walls, some of which were curved and was enclosed on 54th Street by a wooden stockade.
"The plan seems arbitrary, the trees meager, the inner and outer walls casual bordering on tacky. Nor do the photo records of Philip Goodwin's 1942 alteration show much improvement. Principally, Goodwin added refectory facilities, centered in a pavilion where food, wine and beer were served. It looks a spindly affair, with a modernoid slope to its roof and grove of trees nearby whose formal organization seems out of keeping with its informal placement and the irregular pathway around it," noted Schulze.
Johnson's design called for "canals" with low bridges, Hankow willows, European birches and several other species, and a floor and walls of gray Vermont marble. An early design indicated a pair of large boulders between two pools. The boulders were subsequently replaced with cryptomeria trees. Landscape architect James Fanning was involved in the planting design of the garden and Johnson was assisted by Landis Gores and George Hopkinson. A glazed-gray-brick, 14-foot-high wall on 54th Street was interrupted by wooden grills that "relieved the monotony of the expanse of masonry while providing a tempting view of the garden to pedestrians passing in the street," Schulze wrote, adding that Johnson saw the garden "as 'a roofless room' with a sunken court, the latter so planned that the garden could not be seen as a whole at any time or from any place.'" Johnson, Schulze continued, wanted to make a processional space. He quoted Johnson as saying: "Always the sense of turning to see something. The garden became a place to wander, but not on a rigidly defined path. Because the ground is paved, as it would not be in Japanese garden, one is free to find one's own winding path....By cutting down space, you create space."
The Whitney's building, designed by Augustus L. Noel of Miller & Noel, the firm that had designed the museum's Eighth Street facility and whose partner, G. McCullough Miller was married to Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney's daughter, Flora, framed the west end of the garden with a raised deck for open-air dining in front of a glass-enclosed cafeteria that sadly was removed in the subsequent reconstruction by Cesar Pelli for the new Museum Tower. Johnson, in fact, designed the Whitney's east wall since it faced on his garden, which was completed in 1952, the same year that Johnson renovated the Members Penthouse in the Goodwin/Stone building.
According to Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins and David Fishman, writing in "New York 1960, Architecture Between the Second World War and the Bicentennial," The Monacelli Press, 1995, the garden was transformed "from a casual, near-suburban yard to a sophisticated De Stijl-inspired outdoor room."
In 1959, the museum announced plans for a new, 8-story wing on West 54th Street, but the plan was revised in 1961, in part because of concerns about shadows it would cast on the garden. The new design by Johnson called for a two-story pavilion at the east end of the garden and an expansion of the Rogers building on 53rd Street, and a new building to replace two owned by Mrs. E. Paramalee Prentice, the sister of John D. Rockefeller Jr., at 5 and 7 West 53rd Street. The Rogers Building expansion was not undertaken as originally planned, but Johnson created a new black-painted-steel-and-glass building on the Prentice site in 1964. Zion & Breen helped Johnson make a modest redesign of the garden that included staircases leading to the roof of the new pavilion overlooking it.
The museum's Taniguchi expansion did expand the museum's exhibition space and ability to attract even more visitors and included a tall gallery designed to accommodate large, dark and very mimimalist sculptures by Richard Serra.
While the creation of a through-block lobby was good, changes to the garden such as an extremely boring and unattractive north wall were disappointing and sad. More importantly, the "expansion" did not seem to add appreciably to the museum's exhibition spaces.
The realization that the museum did not have enough space led to its decision to sell a narrow through-block site on the block to the Hines Interests that would permit yet another modest expansion. Hines commissioned Jean Nouvel to design a 1,155-foot-high, mixed-use tower for the site that would include, in addition to expansion space for the museum, a hotel and condominium units.
Nouvel's design called for a tapered tower with diagonal bracing and the design was lavishly praised by the architectural critic for The New York Times but was strongly opposed by the local community board who felt that the proposed transfer of hundreds of thousands of square feet of unused development rights from St. Thomas Episcopal Church and the University Club, both about 500 feet to the east on Fifth Avenue on 53rd and 54th Streets, respectively, was excessive and unnecessary for the preservation maintenance program of those properties that would justify the transfers.
The boldly striking new tower would undoubtedly cast some shadows on the museum's garden and block some views from the Museum Tower, which it would dwarf.
Inevitably, the museum will remain immensely popular and it and the Museum Tower will not lose their cachet.
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