Select the images below to open a new window with a larger view While they have included many new and fundamentally transformative concepts, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron's proposal represents a spirited defense of the idea of the art museum as a public place of private encounter. They ask: "Why is it that art keeps asserting itself, keeps renewing itself, keeps arousing our curiosity and confronting us with such fundamental questions as: who am I, why am I, where are we going?" Recognizing the broad spectrum of artistic production in the Museum Collection, from early twentieth-century easel paintings to large contemporary installations in multiple mediums, Herzog and de Meuron's proposal advocates distinctly different spaces characterized by an intellectual as well as a physical sense of refinement, and by a recognizably urban sensibility. In their proposal, this urban sensibility is not only evident in the multiple spaces dedicated to exhibiting works of art but is fundamental to the architects' conception of the entire building. The proposal sheaths the street wall of the Museum's Midtown Manhattan site in a "glass shell", insuring both the transformation and the continuity of New York City's most distinguishing urban characteristic. "The surfaces may be transparent, translucent or opaque. Variations in appearance are achieved by printing or etching the glass. So sometimes it doesn't look like glass at all but more like stone." As a striking counterpart to what might be called the "normative" or "contextual" treatment of the street wall, this proposal includes a tower for the Museum's curatorial and support staff rising over the western portion of the site. An extended asymmetrical polygon, its axis projects at an angle toward Fifty-fourth Street. Herzog and de Meuron's proposed tower is not conceived as a simple vertical multiplication of floor plates but as a complex volumetric form that reflects not only current zoning restrictions and building codes, but also the architects' precise and rigorous approach to formmaking. Skillfully creating a distinction between their intentions and "deconstructive, neoexpressive or symbolic" clichés, they cite Alberto Giacometti's Le Cube of 1934 as an example of a form that "seesaws between abstraction and figuration."     Site Plan (1000x562, 176k) In their pre-Competition conceptual studies, the architects investigated the potential of a public, through-block passage consisting of two open sculpture courtyards, diagonally arranged, behind the Goodwin-Stone facade to the south and the facade of Philip Johnson's North Wing on Fifty-fourth Street. The architects' notion of extending public space into the Museum was retained in the final proposal in the form of two diagonally-related lobbies that provide, in a double-height space, an appropriate setting for urban-scale public sculpture. For the visitor to the Museum, this space is emblematic of an institution in a great city and provides an immediate encounter with the Museum's principal purpose--the display of extraordinary works of art.

Curatorial commentary, selected images, and QTVR of architectural model

Curatorial commentary and selected images

Links to all phases of the MoMA Expansion subsite