Born: Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 1944
Education: Architectural Association, London, 1972
Selected projects: Kunsthal, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 1987­92; Fukuoka Housing, Kiyushu, Japan, 1989­91; Congrexpo, Lille, France, 1990­94

. . .Theoretically, MoMA is about newness. Newness is ambiguous. It cannot last; it cannot have a tradition....

The splendor and uniqueness of MoMA's history complicates its relationship with the present. The expectation of continuity penalizes what is "other," what does not "fit," or the "merely" contemporary. Beyond its power to intimidate, to set standards, to consecrate, an entire domain of exploration, experimentation has become problematic: its investment in a master narrative and the abundant evidence to support "the line" make certain new shows seem like mere tokenism or simply impossible. What can you challenge in a temple....

In this project, we have interpreted the extension as a single operation that maintains what is good, undoes what is dysfunctional, creates new potentials, and leaves open what is undecidable....

The creation of a single display building—a new MoMA—implies that it can be fully equipped to generate unique conditions for each segment of the collections and any of the exhibitions. It will have to accommodate drastically different scales.... Because....the new building will contain the entire Museum program, it will have the advantages of bigness....

Day and Night
Contemporary art needs spaces equipped for the interaction of human beings and technological implements, people, and apparatus. Somehow, daylight is not conductive for this kind of interaction....Whereas painting and sculpture are best revealed in conditions of (simulated) daylight, new arts need a darker, more artificial accommodation, an American night, illuminated by electronic haze, glowing and flickering. There is no escaping the inherent artificiality of the Museum....

Individual vs. Collective
It is a truism that museums are for the masses, the public....Their spaces, their circulations, their diagrams insist on the group, an abstract, undifferentiated client. Yet, more and more technologies provoke the splintering of the collective into an infinite number of individuals, each with his own interest....Such a shift implies that an extension should not only contain new, bigger rooms, but begin to accommodate the individual visitor with a highly specific aim, and also offer cellular accommodation....

Storage vs. Viewing
A museum is an ambiguous treasure house of collections: part is on view and accessible, an often larger part is hidden in storage, aggressively inaccessible....The museum is the only institution that systematically freezes its assets away. Within the extension, the notion of storage should be emancipated. New forms of automated storage, visible storage, and robotic retrieval eliminate arguments of difficult access, unwieldy logistics, and impossibility. Combined with the appeal for a more customized, individual museum experience, the rethinking of storage initiates a new way of conceptualizing the collection....

The Project(s)
Urbanism 2....The city should be admitted to the Museum. The ground floor is reconsidered as a single urban surface. The sculpture garden is lowered, so that its perimeter can inject daylight into the former basement. Because the sculpture garden is sunken, the wall that now surrounds it disappears. This creates a direct visual transparency between 53rd and 54th streets. The two streets acquire a potential equivalence that allows a large variety of entry and exit points and the orchestration of the different flows of visitors. The new level of the sculpture garden is extended as a garden/moat around the entire perimeter of the ground floor, which becomes in its entirety a metropolitan island....This island has become the new lobby. Technically, these spaces—as an explosion of the notion of the present bookshop, used as a café, urban living room, and introductory platform to MoMA's adjunct activities, such as education—could even be entirely open-air in the summer. Daylight now surrounds the former basement on all sides. This new garden level becomes the formal entrance. Previously unfindable elements such as the theaters benefit from a new exposure.

The site of the present restaurant is liberated. As an interior extension of the sculpture garden we project a MoMA forum: a space designed to enable MoMA to organize a wide variety of events, from conferences to parties.... A large balcony—partly inside, partly outside—hovers on street level to create a potential autonomy. It has an independent entrance off the revalued 54th Street. Loading bays for both the Museum and the tower are organized on the west, against the Athletic Club building. The site to the west of the Museum of Folk Art site is used as a temporary MoMA store. Its roof, accessible from the new Museum, is used as an outdoor exhibition area.

Technology....There are two areas in which recent inventions can make a radical difference, control and transport.... Miniaturized technologies offer literally infinite variety, choice, differentiation, and individualization in otherwise stable structures. Robotics replace laborious, unwieldy processes of storage, retrieval, sorting, and reshuffling with smooth movements of frenzied ease that force us to rethink entire systems of classification and categorization. Electronic wiring enables the coexistence of authentic and virtual worlds....

The second innovation is in transport. As more and more architecture is finally unmasked as the mere organization of flow—shopping centers, airports—it is evident that circulation is what makes or breaks public architecture....Two simple, almost primitive, inventions have driven modernization toward mass occupancy of previously unattainable heights: the elevator and the escalator.... One moves only up and down, one only diagonally....

At the dawn of the 21st century, a number of advances in vertical transportation are being made, from cableless self-propelled elevator systems to Otis'....Odyssey, a small train, platform, or large box that moves horizontally, vertically, and diagonally—literally opening up new architectural potential: to extend the urban condition itself from the ground floor to strategic points inside a building in a continuous trajectory.... We have investigated Odyssey's potential of vertical movement in the context of the new MoMA. The program of MoMA is so enormous that it inevitably organizes the public on at least ten levels or more, and the Dorset site extends the length of MoMA to over 600 feet. The escalator cannot deal with those heights, the elevator cannot deal with the length: the Odyssey offer.... hybrid movements up to the challenge. Beginning above the sculpture garden, its trajectory perforates the new Museum with a diagonal courtyard to ascend to the top of the triangle in a single, fluid movement.

The Box....By projecting the front of the Pelli construction to the north, across the Dorset site to 54th Street, a square is generated that accommodates the entire exhibition program in six layers. Instead of a logic of consecutive extensions that are more or less noticeably connected, this strategy would clearly establish a center of gravity on the site. Since all displays would take place in this building, all of its technical equipment and innovation would benefit the entire collection....Such an operation consolidates circulation, services, and adjunct facilities. It creates the greatest possible potentials and freedoms for all imaginable conditions of display and exhibition.

Four typologies have been developed for this charette....We propose two versions of the ultimate box. In the first, the Pelli extension is completely dismantled around the Museum Tower, so that an entirely new condition can be constructed. In the second, the facades of Pelli's buildings are stripped and the floors remain, so that with the addition of a new building the whole would create a differentiation of spaces, ceiling heights, floor levels, and other conditions.

Triangle/Penthouse: The remaining program fits exactly in that section of the zoning envelope that forms a single triangular volume spanning between 53rd and 54th streets....The triangle contains a restaurant at the roof of the exhibition building, public storage accommodation, research facilities, individual viewing cabins for contemplation or study, offices, a library, conservation studios, ateliers, a member's room, and, at the apex, a special-events center.

Old MoMA: The concentration of the entire exhibition program in a new building liberates the old MoMA for a new role. It accommodates, in a self-evident way, the six departments, one per floor. On each floor, storage would be organized on the west side, as a buffer or connector between the departments and the new Museum. The old personnel core connects this storage silo with the larger horizontal storage underneath the new exhibition building. By using the old MoMA for the departments, we can also reduce the height of the second floor and so add another six feet to the height of the ground floor.

MoMA, Inc.: On the east side, the individual departments are connected to MoMA, Inc.: a tower using Philip Johnson's 1970s building as a base, dedicated to administration, membership, publishing, and other activities of dissemination and aura-enhancement. Plans are made and funds raised in MoMA, Inc., tower, which filter down to the curatorial departments; the "thinking" and "knowledge" then activate the idle treasures in their respective storages, which are then propelled to the exhibition surfaces....The Museum's chain of fundraising, "curating," storage, artifact selection, and public display would correspond to the diagram of the new buildings. The chain is also, literally, an ambulatory that runs along 53rd Street on the level of the original balcony to connect tower, box, and triangle.

Project Credits
Rem Koolhaas, Dan Wood with Vincent Coste, Isabelle Da Silva, Rojier van Est, Wilfried Hackenbroich, Matthias Hollwich, Joshua Ramus, Ole Scheeren, Kohei Kashimoto; Graphic Design 2x4: Michael Rock, Susan Sellers with David Israel, Chin-Lien Chen, William Morrisey, Hitomi Murai; Vincent DeRijk; Steven Ahlgren; Hans Werlemann with Frans Parthesius; Stijn Rademakers, Jeff Hardwick; Bill Price, Eric Schotte.


These works have been selected from a larger collection of drawings that were submitted for the charette. In addition, the architect's statement has been abbreviated.