MoMA plans November return to Manhattan

NEW YORK -- The newly renovated and hugely expanded Museum of Modern Art will reopen its Manhattan doors to the public on Nov. 20, marking the end of an $858 million reconstruction project and commemorating its 75th anniversary.

"It will be an extraordinarily beautiful building that will be a terrific addition to New York's architecture as well as an incredible home for the museum's outstanding collection," Glenn Lowry, museum director, said Wednesday in an interview with The Associated Press.

The official groundbreaking for the new building was in May 2001; in the interim years, MoMA has displayed art at a facility in Queens. MoMA QNS will be shut after Sept. 27 and will be used as a storage space.

The new design of the building on West 53rd Street was created by Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi. It nearly doubles the museum's capacity, covering approximately 630,000 square feet over six floors. The exhibition space has increased, from 85,000 square feet to 125,000 square feet.

The building will stretch over an entire block, with entrances on the 53rd and 54th street sides connected by a 12,400-square-foot lobby. Opening up the space visually was a key priority of the reconstruction, with the use of glass as a building material and the creation of a 110-foot atrium that provides for natural light.

The redesigned museum will feature contemporary art, prints and illustrated books and a cafe on the second floor. Architecture and design, drawings, photography and temporary exhibits will be on the third floor. Painting and sculpture will occupy the fourth and fifth floors, and temporary exhibitions will be on the sixth floor.

"The collection will be better. There will be substantially more of the collection and it will be better displayed," Lowry said. "The building as a whole will be far more accommodating so we can bring in larger numbers of visitors and school groups. It will give us a much more generous platform to work from.

"There will be new works of art ... hundreds, if not more. We've been building the collection for the past five years in anticipation of the opening -- major works, iconic works," he said, including Jasper Johns' "Diver" and Pablo Picasso's "Pregnant Woman," a plaster from 1950.

"Nine Museums by Yoshio Taniguchi" is scheduled to be the opening display in the galleries for temporary exhibits on the third floor, presenting MoMA along with the other art museums Taniguchi has designed over the last 25 years.

Taniguchi belongs to the fourth generation of Japanese modernist architects. His father, Yoshiro, a strict modernist, was architect to the Imperial family.

Trained at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, the younger Taniguchi designed the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art in Toyota City and Tokyo Sea Life Park, an aquarium built on landfill on the edge of Tokyo Bay.

MoMA's opening day, Saturday, Nov. 20, will be free of charge to visitors.

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