The Museum of Modern Art reopens on 20 November after being closed for over two years. Its new galleries, designed by Yoshio Taniguchi, are a triumph: a brilliant justification of designing from the inside out

Apollo, Nov, 2004 by Louise Nicholson

On 20 November, after two and a half years of closure, New York's Museum of Modern Art re-opens with three additional new buildings, all by Yoshio Taniguchi, on its 53rd Street site in Midtown Manhattan. Suffused in natural light, his new David and Peggy Rockefeller Building (Fig. 2) joins Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone's original 1989 building, Philip Johnson's sculpture garden (1953), the East Wing, Garden Wing and galleries (all 1964), and Cesar Pelli's 1984 New Wing and museum expansion (Fig. 1). In addition, Taniguchi has designed the museum's new education and research building, which is not yet complete, and its new offices, on the site of the Dorset Hotel.

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The experience of being inside the David and Peggy Rockefeller Building, which houses the museum's new galleries, is uplifting. Stairways and glass bridges make moving around the six floors easy and inviting; views up through skylights and from windows and terraces connect it to earlier parts of the museum and to New York's great skyline (Fig. 4). Above all, Taniguchi's stroke of genius in a meticulously thought-through and executed building is the way the atrium both lights and relates to the galleries to make one aware of the whole building (Fig. 5).

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This achievement is the fruit of a decade of collective measured thought and painstaking preparation before construction began in 2001. Three years and $450 million later, Terence Riley, MOMA'S chief curator of architecture and design, sums it up triumphantly: 'The art world believed we had only two choices: a neutral box, intentionally self-effacing, or the architect's individual statement that would be more powerful than the art. But Taniguchi has marvellously set off the art and at the same time created a superb work of art to house it. No one expected us to achieve this.'

The process began with the huge advantage of no deadline. Trustees, curators and staff took time to look at their mission and their collection, to consider space needs and to study the visitors. First, they considered the institute's original mission. Soon after it opened in 1929, Alfred H. Barr Jr wrote down his pioneering vision of the museum's collection: 'The Permanent Collection may be thought of graphically as a torpedo moving through time, its nose the ever advancing present, its tail the ever receding past of fifty to a hundred years ago.'

Seventy-five years later, under its sixth director, the dynamic Glen Lowry, there was a choice: should the museum restrict itself to its highly esteemed world-class collection of twentieth-century art and merely refine it, abandoning the twenty-first century, or should it reinvigorate Alfred Barf's torpedo approach and move forward? The torpedo won.

The trustees and staff also considered the collection, believing that a new building must grow from the inside, from its collection's needs. Their conclusion was that the focus will remain and even increase--on the unrivalled collection. Certainly, it is the collection that is important to artists, collectors and the general public. 'We all cut out teeth at MOMA', says Vincent Desiderio, whoso work is held by the Guggenheim and Metropolitan museums, adding 'It is the great heroic museum. To be hung in the same museum as Les Demoiselles d'Avignon would be wonderful!'. For Naoto Nakagawa, whose drawings are already in MOMA'S collection and who has visited it most weeks since the 1960s, 'It was, and is, my study collection'. For David Remfry, a British artist living in New York, it is simply 'absolutely essential'.

Contemporary art collectors are more ambivalent. A New York one dubs MOMA 'the gold standard institute of its kind in the world, projecting an image of great clarity', but is less confident of its ability to get the twenty-first century right, a view confirmed by a London collector: 'It is the ultimate reconnection with modern art. What they've got to do now is move forward, engage.' Commercial dealers less generously add that they are the ones who take risks for their artists, while MOMA merely buys once an artist is established.

In fact, MOMA already has in place a quiet but active buying policy for contemporary art. Few people are aware of MOMA'S Fund for the Twenty-first Century, that, Mr Lowry points out, 'allows us to spend at least one million dollars each year on modestly priced works created during the past five years by artists not already established.' And to cries of having a 'Byzantine' acquisition process that has led to missed opportunities, he extols the value of the committee system for 'ensuring enthusiasm, even of the director, is balanced by consideration' and then cites the speedy raising of 'tens of millions of dollars' to secure Jasper Johns's Diver for the collection in 2003. Also, a major consideration, 'the committee system fosters great loyalty, which brings gifts.' As if proof were needed, Harvey S. Shipley Miller, a MOMA trustee who is also sole trustee of the Judith Rothschild Foundation, in September offered the extraordinary gift of 2,500 contemporary drawings by 400 artists from twenty countries. As one observer quipped: 'They are very bright folks at MOMA.'