New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is due to reopen on the 21 October following an expansion designed by American architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Gensler.
The 3,620 sq m expansion increases gallery space by a third. It will also include:
- Live programming and a performance studio at the museum’s centre
- An educational "Creativity Lab" on the second floor
- Free entry to the museum’s sixth floor, as well as the ground floor and sculpture garden
- An expanded ground floor with better connections to the outside
- The expansion of the site’s west end featuring a stack of interlocking galleries of varying heights
- A store lowered one level to create a double-height space.
The Guardian reports that the expansion cost $450m, and will "remix" the collection to put well known works next to creations by less famous artists.
Elizabeth Diller, a partner in Diller Scofidio + Renfro, said: "This project has called on us to work across MoMA’s rich architectural history, incorporating the museum’s existing building blocks into a comprehensible whole through careful and deliberate interventions into previous logics, as well as the construction of new logics that arise from MoMA’s current aspirations.
"This work has required the curiosity of an archeologist and the skill of a surgeon. The improvements will make the visitor experience more intuitive and will relieve congestion, while a new circulation network will knit together the expansion spaces with the lobbies, the theatres, and the sculpture garden to create a contiguous, free public realm that bridges street-to-street and art-to-city."
Images by Iwan Baan, courtesy of MoMA
