Critique

By Robert Campbell, FAIA

A critic is supposed to stimulate a
dialogue, not be one. So wrote the
great Clement Greenberg.
I seem to be one of only a
few critics around who isn’t crazy
about the new Museum of Modern
Art in New York. Maybe I’ll change
my tune after a few more visits—
Greenberg reversed his judgments
sometimes, and it’s greatly to his
credit—and if I do, I’ll perform a
mea culpa. But for now ….
It isn’t that MoMA’s bad. There’s
nothing bad about it. It’s just that it
isn’t good enough. It’s elegant, but it
lacks life and imagination, and those
are qualities we used to associate
with Modernism.
New museums often open with
a blizzard of hype. It’s hard for critics
not to be caught up in the excitement.
Years ago, that happened
with I.M. Pei’s East Building for the
National Gallery in Washington,
D.C. More recently, it happened with
Herzog & de Meuron’s Tate Modern
in London. I didn’t like either of
them at the time, and I still don’t.
And I think a consensus opinion,
over the years, has borne me out.
I say this despite the AIA’s recent
Twenty-five Year Award to the East
Building. I recall when the East
Building opened, the architect Jean
Paul Carlhian, who founded the AIA’s
Committee on Design, said: “It is an
airline terminal.” It was and it is, with
most of the art crammed into residual
spaces around the edges of a
Robert Campbell is the architecture
critic of The Boston Globe and
received the 2004 Award of Honor
from the Boston Society of Architects.
vast, self-regarding, nearly empty
concourse.
Anyway, here are my problems
with MoMA:
There isn’t any architecture.
The design architect, Yoshio
Taniguchi, was quoted more than
once as saying that if MoMA gave
him enough money, he could
make the architecture disappear.
Unfortunately, he’s succeeded.
Most of the museum consists of an
endless rabbit warren of more or
less identical white-walled galleries
with track-lit ceilings. Every attempt
is made to remove any sense of the
presence of architecture. A typical
gallery wall, for example, appears
not to touch the ceiling, the floor, or
the adjacent walls. Instead, all surfaces
are divided from one another
by a thin recessed shadow line. The
effect is to make the wall appear to
be floating, without substance. It
looks not like a wall, but like a white
projection screen. The paintings
on it, as a result, begin to feel like
projected images. You are in the
placeless, timeless world of the slide
lecture. Because the wall doesn’t
feel real, neither does the artwork.
You begin to feel unreal yourself.
Architecture has failed to create a
place that either the paintings or
you yourself can inhabit with a
sense of presence.
MoMA argues that it was trying
to avoid creating a “destination
building,” like Frank Gehry’s Bilbao,
the kind of building that can upstage
its contents. “It’s all about the art,”
one curator told me. But this is a
false dichotomy. The choice is not
between no architecture and too
much architecture. What’s wanted
is the right amount of architecture.
Many museums—to cite a few, the
Kimbell and Mellon by Louis Kahn;
the Maeght and Miro by Josep Lluis
Sert; the De Menil, Beyeler, and
Nasher by Renzo Piano; the Bregenz
by Peter Zumthor; the Pulitzer by
Tadao Ando; the Dia:Beacon by
Robert Irwin and OpenOffice—all
find ways to articulate space clearly
enough to give the artworks a place
within which to exist. And they all
do it without overwhelming the art.
Lost in space
Besides the walls, a similar game
is often played with the floor.
Sculptures, chairs, or other objects
stand on white platforms that seem
to float above the floor like rafts or
ice floes. Like the projection-screen

walls,
the floes remove the objects
from the world and the viewer and
make them a kind of disembodied
media experience.
There’s no parti. There’s
nothing wrong with white-walled
galleries up to a point. It’s fine to
step off the sidewalk in Chelsea or
57th Street, wander through three
or four gallery rooms, and return to
the street, the trees, and the cars.
Something happens, though, when
you multiply those few rooms into
a few dozen. The change becomes
not merely one of quantity, but also
one of quality. At that point, you
need a new and bolder architectural
idea to generate order. It’s
lacking at MoMA. The only attempt
to create a center that can magnetize
the galleries into some kind
of perceptible whole is a multistory
atrium that begins at the second
level and stops short of the roof.
Holes are cut into the sides of theatrium, so that you can sometimes
overlook it from a gallery. It’s a
sort of miniature, rectangular
Guggenheim. It’s wholly inadequate
as a parti idea. It’s insufficient to
orient you in a museum that at
times feels like a trackless waste
of white tundra. The museum’s
curators and architects have taken
the old MoMA and multiplied it
sideways and upward, without
feeling the need to for an organizing
concept.
The air-to-art ratio is too
high. The volume of empty air is
enormous in places like the entry
lobby, the atrium, and the secondfloor
and top-floor galleries. As a
result, artworks intended to confront
or absorb you with their bold size
and scale—Pollocks, Miros, Kellys,
Monets, and others—now find
themselves in spaces that are tailored
to fit them. In proportion to the
space they occupy, these big paint