The MOMA Expansion: A Conversation with Terence Riley

Author(s): Hal Foster, Denis Hollier, Silvia Kolbowski, Rosalind Krauss, Terence Riley
Source: October, Vol. 84 (Spring, 1998), pp. 3-30
Published by: The MIT Press
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The MOMA Expansion:

A Conversation with Terence Riley*

HAL FOSTER, DENIS HO L

I.TER,
SILVIA KOLBOWSKI, AND ROSALIND KRAUSS

Hal Foster:Can you give us a general summary of the competition process?

TerenceRiley: In brief, a lot of paper was generated by the selection process.
Underlying the process of the museum selecting an architect is the presupposition that, for the architect to develop a proposal or a scheme, the
museum has to be able to explain to the architect its position on a variety of
important issues. In a day-to-day mode, people who work in a building rarely
think about how these issues can be expressed in architecture. They might
think about renovating or expanding or altering space, but it's difficult to
actually get people to reconceptualize how they do things and how that
relates to spatial issues. To overcome this, our process involved discussions
among curators, staff, and trustees, as well as other people at various closed
conferences, such as the one at Pocantico, which included a number of
architects, museum directors, critics, historians, and writers, and more public
forums such as the lecture series last fall.
Silvia Kolbowski:Who selected the participants?
Riley:Mainly the director and the chief curators. The idea was not to get the choir
to sing in harmony at Pocantico, for example. And they were just discussions;
there were no lines drawn on paper. In the background, the firm of Cooper,
Robertson and Partners was assembling a program, a needs analysis.
To answer a question which Silvia asked me before-if the program is
*
Following research into an expansion initiated by the Museum of Modern Art in 1995, the
Architect Selection Committee, in early 1997, invited ten architects to participate in a Charette to
determine how each of the architects would approach the site and program for the expansion. The
Architect Selection Committee was comprised of Sid R. Bass, Chairman; David Rockefeller, Sr.; Ronald
Lauder; Agnes Gund; Marshall Cogan; and Jerry Speyer, with the participation of Glenn D. Lowry,
Museum Director, and Terence Riley, Chief Curator of Architecture and Design. Edward Larrabee
Barnes, BarbaraJakobsen, Philip Johnson, and John Elderfield, Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs,
acted as advisors to the committee. The architects were Wiel Arets, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de
Meuron, Stephen Holl, Toyo Ito, Rem Koolhaas, Dominique Perrot, Yoshio Taniguchi, Bernard
Tschumi, Raphael Vinoly, and Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. In the spring of 1997, the group was
narrowed down to Herzog and de Meuron, Taniguchi, and Tschumi. The three finalists submitted
their proposals in September 1997, with a decision planned for December 1997. This conversation
took place in November of 1997.
OCTOBER84, Spring 1998, pp. 3-30. ? 1998 OctoberMagazine,Ltd. and MassachusettsInstituteof Technology.

OCTOBER

such an important document, how can you think of it as a neutral needs

analysis? We never did. The idea of the conference and, later, the Charette
was actually to influence the program with architectural thinking. In other
words, the idea was that before the program was finished as a document, a
group of architects would react to it in the first stage of the selection
process, and provide, for the first time, architectural imagery, architectural
thinking. The museum would subsequently revise the program in light of
that, and then move toward a more traditional competition. The difference
between a Charette and a competition, in my mind, is that a competition
typically seeks an optimized single solution to an architectural problem. To
present that optimized architectural solution, each of the architects has to
hide all of the programmatic work they've done. And usually the earlier
work is more open-ended, more about exploring different options. What we
did in the Charette is to ask them to reveal that way of thinking, to allow us
to review those open-ended, inconclusive proposals and ruminations that
every architect goes through on the way to an optimized conclusion. We just
asked them to stop at a certain point to allow for a dialogue: how far have
you gotten, what are you thinking about?
Foster:When you imply that you wanted the process to be intellectual as much as
architectural, what exactly do you mean?
Riley: If you compare the way architects are most often picked for projects in
America versus the way they are often picked in Europe, you'll find that
there is a much longer tradition in Europe of the architectural competition.
The idea of the competition is to solicit architectural responses which arrive,
by and large, whole; whoever is in charge of picking then selects what they
believe to be the strongest architectural solution. The architects enter into
the process more or less with their intellectual position intact. It gives the
architect an awful lot of leverage in the relationship.
Kolbowski:Why do you think it gives the architect leverage?
Riley:Because they have been publicly proclaimed to have the best ideas.
Kolbowski:
You mean, once the decision is made?
Yes.
Whereas in America, the people who generally hire architects, such as
Riley:
developers and individuals and corporations, think of the architect as someone
who is being asked to provide a service, and not necessarily as someone who
brings to the job a highly developed intellectual position. I think that in this
country, the people who usually pick architects prefer that. We also wanted
to avoid a process that was driven by the politics of the institution. We
wanted to convince a lot of people that there was a better way of doing this,
and that in fact it could be an interesting process. The challenge was to take
a group of laymen who, I suspect, are more visually aware than their peers,
and to see how much they could learn about architecture from the whole
process. I would say it's going to be a success in that regard.
Kolbowski:The architects are educating the clients.

TheMOMAExpansion:A Conversationwith TerenceRiley

Rosalind Krauss:So it is very political. There could be nothing more political than
educating the client.
Riley: I'm not saying that anything can be nonpolitical. However, if a political
process is defined as one through which he who has the most influence
selects the winning architect, without any reference to the intellectual issues
involved, then this has been an intellectual process as opposed to a political
one.
Kolbowski:There was an attempt to make the process more reciprocal?
Riley:There was an attempt to make it more of a dialogue, and also to ensure that
when the architects are hired, they have a certain standing in the process,
that it isn't about being beholden to whatever political processes might have
taken place if we had done it otherwise. If we go through a king-maker
process, then the architect comes to the job with nothing but gratitude to an
individual for having bestowed upon them a commission rather than having
a standing in the whole process based on knowledge of the institution and
the intellectual position represented and validated by the committee.
Krauss:Are you saying that the model you're trying to establish is the opposite of
the Frank Gehry/Guggenheim-Bilbao one, where the architect is beholden
to the client, who presumably in this case is Krens?
Riley: If we're talking about a model, then yes, it's the opposite of the Bilbao
situation. However, in the instance of Krens and Gehry, I would say that
Bilbao is actually a bad example of the "king-maker"model, because there
was no intention to exert control over Frank Gehry's design. Most of the
time, when an architect is hired, the main issue is controlling the architect.
Kolbowski:But there are two significant American models. On the one hand, there
is the architect hired by the developer/client, who performs a service by
facilitating the aims of the developer. But Gehry is a different type of
American architect, the signature architect of which there are a number in
Europe as well, who do have more control over determining the development of a project or building.
Riley:Right. But Gehry is such a singular instance that it's hard to hold him up as
a standard-bearer of that type of model.
Kolbowski:But there are other people who can be slipped into that position.
Gehry's not the only one.
Denis Hollier:I would like to know what made you choose that process-bringing
together the intellectual and visual with the architectural instead of a more
traditional process of choosing a signature architect. Is that specific to the
way you see the project?
Riley:Well, as I started out saying, to get a successful new Museum of Modern Art,
two things have to happen. One, the institution needs to understand what it
wants to be and has to be able to express that clearly. Two, the architect has
to understand what is being communicated. This is another polarity
between this museum and Bilbao, in that Bilbao is ex novo. It has no history.

OCTOBER

Whatever Frank Gehry designs becomes the base upon which the institution
grows hereafter. In the case of the Modern, you have a nearly seventy-yearold institution. So it has a history, but it does not simply want to do things it
has done before. The process has to be able to communicate this to the
architect. That means there have to be dialogues and exchanges of ideas
which are not usually present in a lot of selection models.
Krauss:The documents we read for this discussion, mainly your public lecture and
Glenn Lowry's, left me feeling totally bewildered about this idea of expressing
what the institution wants to be. I found it tremendously scattered, with
Lowry writing, for instance, that there are no typological models that we can
look at, such as palaces, or world's fairs. There is just an endless set of possible
metaphors: sponges, skeletons, crazy quilts, montage. You both used the
word heterotopia, by which I assume you mean Foucault's or the Situationist
notion of unprogrammed space.
Riley:First of all, I shouldn't speak for Glenn Lowry. Second, I was not making a
reference to Foucault. When I talk about heterotopia, what I most want to
express is the notion that the museum should have an interior landscape
that reflects the fact that very few people could be said to come to the
museum for the exact same reason. By this diversity of experiences and
activities I'm referring notjust to functional distinctions, like a dining room
isn't a gallery isn't a coat room. As opposed to the notion of a continuous
seamless interior that gives little indication of the variety of activities taking
place in the museum, I believe there should be an architecture of many
places. The idea is that different subjective environments can be expressed
within one envelope.
Kolbowski:What role does hierarchy play in that? In a typical museum, there's a
hierarchy of spaces, including the spaces of overt commercial exchange, like
a museum store, or the eating areas, video viewing areas, painting/sculpture
areas, the lobby. Are you saying that there is less of an evident hierarchical
distinction? When you use the word heterotopia are you talking about establishing distinctions between these areas, but not in as hierarchical a manner
as is typically done?
Riley: There were two ways in which I used the term in my lecture. One had a
historical dimension to it, the other had a programmatic dimension. In
terms of history, if you go into the museum right now and walk around the
interior, there is no moment when you would be aware that you are actually
moving from a building that was done in 1939, to one done in the '60s and
one done in the '80s. There is a vertical distinction between all of these
phases of the building on the exterior, whatJacques Herzog called a still life
of the apple, orange, ginger pot variety. But in the interior there has been
an attempt to make a seamless continuous space, which I think shows a very
high level of discomfort with the historical dimension of the museum.
In the programmatic sense, I suppose we did not, and I certainly did

The MOMA Expansion: A Conversation with TerenceRiley

not in my lecture, deal with how the notion of hierarchy gets expressed in
what is a multiprogram institution. Nonetheless, one model we talked about
with the architects was that it was rather distressing that it took so long to
see any art, as the whole process becomes more and more encumbered by
the clothes check, and the information, ticket, and orientation areas, etc. In
contrast, at the Museum of Natural History in New York, before you even
buy the ticket, one of the greatest experiences of the museum is there on
the threshold-the dinosaur skeletons. You don't have to go through the
whole process of shedding coats and ticketing and other things to actually
have some kind of direct experience of why the museum is actually there.
Kolbowski:As you described this desire for a more immediate experience of the
art, I thought about one of the Wiel Arets drawings, which is a view of the
lobby area from what looks like an open mezzanine cafe. This is the opposite
of the immediacy you're describing, in that some of the main reasons that
people visit museums these days-to be in a public setting with crowds of
other people, to go to a museum cafe, to buy objects-extend the space of
access and delays the encounter with art even further. That's why a
museum's attitude about spatial and programmatic hierarchy is significant.
Krauss:The example that you gave about heterotopia as a model-aside from the
notion of layers and the multiplicities of subjective experiences it containsalso implies the basic experience of installation art in which one encounters
an interior conceived by an artist inside another interior: that of the
museum. Going back a bit, I think that there are two previous models operating at MOMA, historically. One was Alfred Barr's model, a utopian one
emerging from the Bauhaus understanding of modernism as total designfrom cars to Mixmasters to works of art to great buildings to posters. And his
museum reflected that in terms of the kinds of departments he was willing to
establish and fund as quasi-equal entities. In the '60s another model came to
replace that one, associated with William Rubin. It had to do with medium
specificity and with the privileging of painting and sculpture over all the
other departments, since it was in painting that the specificity of the
medium was most clearly stated over the course of modernism. Thus there
was a very strong hierarchy. And even when the '80s enlargement took place,
instead of breaking with this model in order to reintegrate the painting and
sculpture galleries with the others-like photography and design-it only
reinforced Rubin's model since it produced a sacred set of galleries, withdrawn from the vertical circulation, the escalators, the open well. It is as
though it underscores that behind that barrier, in those sacred spaces, the
real business of the museum goes on. What fascinates me now is that in
1997, thirty years or so after Rubin's mark was initially set on this, I am looking
in these documents for a new model. That's why I fasten on the theme of
heterotopia, because it seems to have an interesting relationship/nonrelationship to Barr's utopian model. The one specific example you give of

WielArets(TheNetherlands).
Charettesubmissionshowingview of lobbyfrom mezzanine.

1984 expansion,includinggarden hall

and westwing. (Photo:ScottFrancis.)
? 1989 TheMuseumof ModernArt.

The MOMA Expansion: A Conversation with TerenceRiley

heterotopia is installation art, which is to say, the implosion of medium

specificity.
Riley: The reason I raised the example of installation art is that, more than any
other example, that work redefines the interior of a museum differently in
that it involves the very presence of smaller environments within a larger
one. These aren't objects. In other words, even if we just simply extended the
Bill Rubilnmodel, you have to recognize that there are multiple authors now
involved, perhaps not as architects, but as artists. So I used the example of
installation art to ask, if the museum can readily accept the idea that artists
can come into this space, reconfigure it, remake a generic space into subjectively oriented personal spaces, why can't the whole museum be conceived
more like that?
Krauss:Why should it?
Riley: To get into it, I would have to question your analysis of Rubin's model,
particularly as it relates to the "white box." It's half myth, half truth. I think
you're correct in labeling the Barr model as utopian. If you look at the
photographs of the 1939 museum, it's also a very subjective space, it's a very
loaded space. One is meant to feel something going through those rooms.
The allusion to the apartment is one that's very well known. There's also an
allusion to the artist's atelier-a fusion of the Brancusi studio, the personalscaled, intimate gallery, and the apartment. This reflected Barr's belief in
the genius of modern art, that it escaped the power of the state, that it was
about individual relationships between artists and collectors. I think that the
Rubin white box is a post-facto theorization of what is actually a devolution
away from the utopian model. It was by no means an overnight change: it
took from about 1940 to 1960 to make this into the status quo, and along the
way it was theorized. To understand the white box, you have to consider the
"Black Box," the theater. The reason the theater can have seven hundred
different films in it every year is because it's reprogrammed every night. It's
set up so that content can be removed and new content put in. If there was
something utopian about Barr's '39 building, it was also fairly static. What
you see increasingly if you look at the installation shots of the '40s is that
those delicate curtains, the little baseboards, the terrazzo floors, the
translucent glass walls, and the skylights are disappearing, and bit by bit the
architecture is being eaten up to, in effect, make it reprogrammable. A space
that had the permanent collection in it before is now being used for a
temporary show. A space that used to have a translucent glass wall now has
an opaque wall showing whatever paintings had been acquired since 1939.
The demands of reprogramming the space became part and parcel of the
way the museum grew. In other words, it is no longer four brownstones, it's
the equivalent of eight, because half the time you're reprogramming it; it's a
cheaper way of expanding than actually expanding the space. Furthermore,
the only way to efficiently reprogram architectural space is to lessen the

10

OCTOBER

effect of the architecture, which is to get rid of it-to create what I call a
Dumpster architecture, which is totally transformable.
Kolbowski:I'd like to say something about programmability and reprogrammability.
I was struck by a reference, in one of the documents we read, to the notion
that the museum should accommodate experimentation; this is said in the
context of a discussion of what the future of the museum should be. It
seems to me to be a very complex problem to project this future. In the
past, museums developed in a much less self-conscious manner so that
they sometimes came up against cultural boundaries or resistances or
changes. Deciding to then accommodate these changes in a pragmatic and
sometimes awkward sense is one thing. Anticipating accommodation is
another thing altogether. The notion that a museum should first and foremost be able to accommodate anything and everything that comes up, as
well as being at the ready to anticipate what might change in the near
future-which is also touched on in the text-seems to me to be problematic
in relation to the architectural brief. Certainly, some notion of accommodation was present in the Barr museum, in the sense that the environment
was meant to be sympathetic to the objects being displayed. But, for example,
the project room of the late '60s and early '70s was a small, interstitial
space which was used to display work for which the museum didn't have
departmental space. Maybe it was seen as inadequate, but it provided a
very intense and focused experience. I suppose I'm being nostalgic in
wanting to see certain edge conditions in the museum, but how do you
accommodate or anticipate experimentation, in architectural or institutional terms?
Riley:That's a very valid question. All the architects have responded to a request
for more experimental space. All the architects have responded to what
Lowry asked for, which was an increased visibility of contemporary art. We
actually asked the question, Should we keep the project space? Why is the
project space there?
Kolbowski:I'm not talking about the current project space, which has a different
status.
Riley:At the time the current project space was considered, contemporary art was
so hard to find in the galleries, because of the way that the chronological
system was set up. Do you need the project space if in fact the museum's
designed so that your first encounters with art are with contemporary art?
The way that Lowry has expressed it is that he is hoping that all the galleries
privilege contemporary art, and that you don't have to go through 150 years
of history to find contemporary art.
Kolbowski:One could certainly raise questions about that, but what I'm asking is
more general. If the discourse of the projected museum already incorporates
a critique of the institution-some of the texts go so far as to say that-if
that is an a priori goal, how does an architect respond to that? In other

TheMOMAExpansion:A Conversationwith TerenceRiley

11

words, how does an architect respond to the brief of a boundless space that
can accommodate any possible relationship to the museum?
Riley:I don't know if that's actually the goal. I don't think it can be accommodated
in that sense. Let me go back to a couple of things. Rosalind was asking,
What is in these documents? What is the premise that's going to allow
something to happen that hasn't happened before?
Krauss: That's not what I asked, because I think there is no program in these
documents.
Riley: I think you're wrong. I think the museum designs that I'm seeing coming
out of them are a very different kind of museum and they're related to what
the architects have read in these documents. Is this a fundamentally new
institution type? No. Within the parameters and the definition of the
existing type, is there a possibility for great transformation? Yes. And that's
what's happening here.
Foster:I see a program in the mission statement, but I think there is a tension, even
a contradiction. On the one hand, it affirms the importance of contemporary
art, indeed all forms of visual expression; it sees the museum as open-ended.
This is a commitment, beyond the Rubin model, to postmodernism in one
guise or another. On the other hand, there is your idea of a heterotopia. No
contradiction yet, but a heterotopia is a matter not only of spaces but also of
subjectivities, and one subjectivity you privilege is a critical one that we tend
to associate with a critical modernism, one of medium specificity even. So
here, in part, we are back to the Rubin model. That is a tension that may be
difficult to manage ideologically, let alone architecturally.
Another problem. I think art needs resistance, needs the recalcitrance
of limits. One thing that has happened, in this move to accommodate
contemporary art, is that museums have actually trumped it; that is, they
have used the transgressions of the postwar period as a license to develop
another kind of space, usually a spectacular one, which prompts another
kind of subjectivity, also spectacular, in the viewer. Several years ago Rosalind
saw this tendency at work at the Guggenheim with projects like Mass MOMA
["The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum," October54]. And, man,
has it come true with a vengeance in Bilbao-the art museum as spectacle,
as intimidation mixed with entertainment (intimidation as entertainment).
Krens and Gehry are triumphal because this space can accommodate any
contemporary art (even Serra looks like a small fish in that huge bowl). But
is this what art needs-to be swallowed whole? Is this what the museum
needs as a type-to take its place alongside the theme park and the sports
complex? In part your proposal is nostalgic and naive, but I want to support
it precisely there because it attempts to hold on to the value of criticality. In
your paper you talk about a space that will allow, even encourage, skepticism, even autonomy, but your examples in this regard are libraries, not
museums. These are Enlightenment values, which maybe MOMA supported

12

OCTOBER

-I

11

I'

The MOMA Expansion: A Conversation with TerenceRiley

13

Aboveand left:Interiorshotsof Bilbaofrom

Paris Vogue, December'97-January '98.

Installationview,Art in Our Time:

Tenth Anniversary Exhibition.
CuratedbyAlfredH. Barr,Jr. Museum
of ModernArt. 1939. (Photo:Soichi
Sunami.)CourtesyMuseumof ModernArt.

14

OCTOBER

in part in the past. But it is certainly different from this other model of the
museum we have now-the Bilbao Extravaganza.
Riley:I essentially agree with you, but I don't want to get into the position of saying
you get only one or the other.
Foster:But that is what heterotopia might mean-the possibility of different spaces
and subjectivities.
Riley:I want to emphasize the uniqueness of our problem, for which we had very
few, if any, models. We could do what has become the institutionalized
response, like that of MOCA in Los Angeles, where there is a head office,
very sleek, obviously the seat of the power, and then there's the Temporary
Contemporary, which gives them two completely different models: the little
palazzo and the barn. The contemporary work can go in the barn-it's very
flexible, it can do all sorts of things. The thing they have to live with forever
are the intellectual implications of the public's perception that what happens
in one place is very different from what happens in the other place. The
other thing we could have done is close down Fifty-third Street and simply
find another site. We looked at Columbus Circle, and the south side of
Union Square on Fourteenth Street, which I liked because it not only had
the park in front, but is right on the symbolic divide between uptown and
downtown. But how amnesiac can you get and still be considered the same
institution? Another idea was to extend the museum as it has always
extended, along Fifty-third Street. That would have extended the historical
racetrack of single galleries enfilade, one after the next, even further. The
most expensive option was to buy through the block for the express purpose
that the flow through the galleries be less rigid, that there could be multiple
options-different models like the crazy quilt, the sponge, core and satellites.
All of these different images which the chief curators were advocating for, so
that there could be more subtlety to the curatorial intent, came up at
Pocantico. Core and satellite, or fixed and flexible as it has recently been
called, was the model that was finally selected, and I think it was the most
important one. For all the problematics of having Cindy Sherman and
Picasso as a part of a spatial continuum ...
Kolbowski:That's not where the problem lies.
Riley:I think that in spatial and architectural terms, the fact that you can go from
the Demoisellesto the Gold Marilyn to Cindy Sherman's film stills is great.
Listen, you put your own brake on somewhere. If you think the architects or
the museum should somehow create a divide, to express what we all know to
be a major shift in thinking, then I would ask, do you establish that divide by
selecting a certain year? If that divide is, for example, 1965, then Cindy
Sherman is next to Richard Serra's IntersectionII [1992], on that side of the
divide. Does that divide make any sense in regard to the presentation of the
work?
Kolbowski:Actually, I think your example of Cindy Sherman, Warhol's Marilyn, and

TheMOMAExpansion:A Conversationwith TerenceRiley

15

Picasso is not a very good example. Because they already coexist quite
comfortably in an exhibition continuum. The question arises with the art
museum enclosing a project that was intended as an outdoor work. And
that brings up the issue of resistance again. The problem is, you cannot
reprogram resistance into the institution. Once there is already a discourse
about crossing that threshold of resistance-politically, ideologically, intellectually-once the museum already broaches that discussion and develops a
discourse of accessibility, and of satisfying the needs of all different types of
practices...
Krauss:And visitors.
Kolbowski:I'm not saying that the institution should censor itself on these matters,
but once the institution engages in that kind of discussion, there is no turning
back. In Bilbao, you have the kind of institution that presents itself as
limitless. In such a space, do art works become, as Hal suggested, static,
and ecstatic objects suspended in a wonderland spectacle, in the service of
economic investment? What happens to a museum when there is no possibility
for transgression? How is that phenomenon taken into account in MOMA's
idea of a new museum?
Riley: The question you're asking is, if you're accommodating transgression is it
really transgression? I keep thinking of the Tinguely sculpture in the garden
because to this day I'm not certain whether it was meant to blow up or if it
was an accident. Maybe the potential for transgression is somewhat
unpredictable, even when you're inviting transgression, so to speak. But let
me come back to the question of audience. Does this program mean that we
are proposing an entirely new type of cultural and social space, versus a
transformation of certain kinds that already exist? I think it's more of the
latter. For instance, some 1.3 million people come to the museum every year.
Many of them are tourists. The museum has a certain reputation that seeps
out to these people in some fairly unpredictable fashion: airline magazines,
newspaper reviews, etc. There is also a dedicated core of people who come
back repeatedly. Some of them are even homeless people who are there just
to be warm. There are people who have never gone to the galleries, that only
go to the film theaters. I don't feel that any of these people are ineligible to
come to the museum, and if some aspect of the museum, to a certain portion
of its audience, is a kind of spectacle, whether or not it is intended to be so,
that's beyond the museum's control. We don't prequalify visitors; it's part of
the nature of public space.
Kolbowski:The question is how you could establish through architecture some
kind of critical delay, which is a term you use in your text. Is it even possible?
Riley:I want to describe what we've talked about in terms of the galleries and what
we hope to achieve there. Realizing that the devolution away from the
utopian space affords the museum incredible flexibility at the expense of any
architectural experience ...

16

OCTOBER

Krauss: Could you just clarify that? You keep saying that there was incredible
flexibility, but what actually happened in the galleries was that they
became more and more rigid, these little rooms enfilade. And the story
they promulgated became more and more univocal.
Riley:Are you saying rigid architecturally, or rigid curatorially, intellectually?
Krauss:Rigid programmatically.But then that expressed itself in these little galleries,
that mostly didn't change.
Riley:But in those little galleries, most of the art works didn't change either. Most of
the art works' scale came from studios that were the same size as the galleries.
Krauss:Yes, that's why I don't know what you mean by flexibility.
Riley:I am talking about architectural flexibility, which you can see if you look at
the successive plans of the museum, at six-month intervals over the last
thirty years. For example, the third floor, which has great galleries in terms
of height and proportion, is where we show the contemporary collection.
But it's also the most desired space for temporary shows. With every new
show, they tear the whole thing down and start over. Sheetrock sort of looks
like plaster, so it looks permanent, but it's all about flexibility. The fact is
that because of the brownstone depth, there is really no room for more
than two galleries from the street to the Garden Hall. Breaking out of that
restriction was the whole motivation for buying the hotel. That doesn't
mean that we will not continue to have a narrative. I think that's how you
define an art museum.
Krauss:I do too. That's why I'm struck by the concept of heterotopia, which is a
notion of no narrative.
Riley:I disagree. It's not going to be a place without a narrative, but the narrative
could be more subtle and the architecture can support this. After going
through the Charette we realized that the terms core and satellite were not
quite right. In the notion of core galleries with adjacent satellite galleries,
the term "core" implied that those galleries should be in the center. When
Bernard Tschumi did his scheme he realized that if core is more permanent
and more architectural, it should be at the perimeter, because if you go
through a building from the facade to the middle, the most permanent is
the facade, which has to be weatherproof. As you move toward the middle,
you get into the flexible Sheetrock core. This is a model that stimulated a lot
of thinking about the possibility that there was a narrative core gallery that
began with the Cezannes and continued chronologically to the present, as
the museum has always tried to do. Within that and around that there are
galleries with a more reprogrammable, more flexible configuration.
Krauss:Is that an example of what you meant when you said that the architects
would start to provide program over the course of the Charette?
Riley: Not precisely. They would influence the architectural direction of the
program. In other words the curators were talking conceptually. What we
needed was an architect to respond to those concepts in an architectural

TheMOMAExpansion:A Conversationwith TerenceRiley

17

fashion. Tschumi's observation was very helpful because it made us realize

that core could be at the perimeter, near permanency, not in the center.
Kolbowski:Even more so, the Tschumi response had to do with interconnecting
program, rather than using a binary model.
Riley:But we also requested an interconnection, and it was interesting to see how
Tschumi responded. Within this narrative we wanted people to be able to
determine different narratives. Tschumi inserted multiple Goodwin Stone
stairs symbolically throughout the whole mass. So there is the layout of a
kind of promenade narration, but then there is also the presence of what he
calls "chutes and ladders," vertical escapes which could be interesting in
themselves in allowing for connections between Braque and Oldenburg,
for example, instead of just going forward. Whether or not these are huge
intellectual leaps is maybe up for questioning, but in terms of how they
reflect on the way we currently do things, there could not be a greater
distinction. One other way of thinking about heterotopia concerns the
number of instances in the museum where the Rubin/Barr models aren't in
evidence. There are exceptional situations, like the Monet water lily paintings,
where for once the presentation is not comparison. It's about falling out of
the sequence and being able to sit there and have an experience. I think
that room, as weirdly placed as it is within the circulation, has incredible
architectural presence, views of the city, the garden, and it all works. It's
actually evidence that the idea that the proper way to experience a work of
art in a museum requires isolation from all exterior references (which was
not Barr's idea) was wrong. And the notion that the only way to see a work of
art is if it is enframed by other works of art is also challenged. Certainly
installation art is, I think, about artists trying to escape the curatorial grasp,
stranglehold if you will, and insisting that their art be seen as art within its
own context. There's every reason to be more open to the possibility that
there could be not just galleries, but different spaces where different ways of
looking at art were not only allowed, but encouraged.
Hollier: I have a feeling that MOMA used to be more assertive about its presence.
There is something interesting but relatively tentative in what you just said and
what is present in the lectures. There is an uncertainty about the present. I
find it very strange and puzzling to associate such a big reconfiguration with
an interrogative and soul-searching process, rather than with a positive,
affirmative relationship to some of what's going on now.
Riley:The architects who were exposed to the whole Charette process were perhaps
more eloquent, or maybe we were more eloquent with them than in the
documents which were distributed, but nevertheless, I don't feel there is
tentativeness to our approach. As I mentioned before, a primary idea which
came out of the discussions was that it would be almost impossible to conceive of the next building as one where you would have to go through a
150-year history of art to see contemporary works, and very hard to believe

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OCTOBER

that the scale of the presentation of contemporary artists and contemporary

works would have to be limited to something the size of a brownstone
depth. Subsequently, and throughout the process, Lowry began to discuss
with the curators the notion that he believes that we absolutely have to
privilege contemporary art in the future.
Kolbowski:The question is, what does privileging the contemporary mean? In the
past, it meant being overtly selective about what was going to be supported
and what wasn't. There were certain things that were not going to be shown
in the institution, and other things that were.
Riley:If you do contemporary exhibitions in an isolated, periodic fashion, for one
thing you hold up what might be a young artist to incredibly intense
scrutiny.
Foster:Poor babies!
Riley:OK, but when you do it on such a selective basis, if you do it so infrequently, the
artist has to suffer the incredible weight of representing the museum for a
given year. What everybody recognizes is that you can't have one contemporary
show a season, it can't be one artist, it has to be multiple artists.
Krauss:To return to the point you opened with, that this is an architectural competition with intellectual input, the issue about how to think architecturally
about this input inevitably opens onto what the museum thinks its activities
will be, what its projects will be in the future. These inextricable connections
are what make this competition incredibly interesting. If the curators say, we
want spaces that would hold this kind of contemporary thing, which as Denis
points out, is an as yet undefined present which seems to be something like
installation art, then how does an architect imagine-and this is what Silvia
keeps asking-the space of, let's say, either infinite permissibility, or perhaps
endlessly rigid regulation against which it is possible for somebody to
transgress? How does Hans Haacke do anything meaningful in a space of
infinite permissibility?
Riley: Your point is well taken. But we are talking now about a sliding scale of
spaces, with the core collection or the principle narrative being more
architectural, not permanent, but more fixed. Like the water lily paintings,
the core collection will allow you to see something in a semifixed environment. If you have the galleries along the perimeter of the building and you
know the Brancusis are going to be there for twenty years, you get windows,
you get views out. You can deal with more architecture and make it a more
meaningful experience at the levels of both art and architecture. As you
move away from that core, there should be an opportunity for, say, the
example that John Elderfield has given, that next to the Duchamp there
should be a space that can be converted to have Atget's photographs, an
opportunity for flexibility. And, there should be spaces for changing
exhibitions, which really require barns. This is not an attempt to address all
possibilities, but more possibilities.

TheMOMAExpansion:A Conversationwith TerenceRiley

19

Kolbowski:In terms of what role the architect should play in developing the
definition of the institution, how would you anticipate whether the contemporary artist would like to work in a barn or go into the fixed space, where
there is some kind of given content, to work more interstitially? To me the
most interesting aspect of contemporary art is a tendency or intention to
address an already given condition. It's very hard to do that in spaces that
are boundless and limitless. It's not that you can recapture a lost innocence,
but maybe the only way the architect can play with this overly permissive client
or program is to establish certain kinds of limitations on an architectural
level.
Riley:The loss of an innocence, incapable of being recovered, is I think at the heart
of what you're saying. But think of a recent example of "transgression"-what
Peter Eisenman did at the Centre Canadienne d'Architecture in Montreal.
He didn't do that installation in the temporary galleries. He ripped through
the permanent collection. Yet it was all sanctioned by the CCA, it was allowed
to happen.
Foster:I think to simply say that old kinds of space and subjectivity cannot be recovered is an excuse-an excuse that leads to an embrace of the Guggenheim
model, the transnational corporate model of ever-new products, images,
spaces, subjects, etc.
Kolbowski:I'm not talking about recovering old spaces or subjectivities. But I'm
wrong in even alluding to the word "innocence." What I mean is that there is
no going back to a period where ...
Riley:... people were shocked by Duchamp.
Kolbowski:Right, no going back to restriction at the level of taste or ideology or
discourse. And if you have a discourse that's about the inclusiveness of so
many, sometimes conflicting, ideologies, there is no going back to any type
of limit.
Riley:As I said, I don't think it should be absolutely inclusive, if inclusive means
that you constantly rejigger the definition so that it includes everything.
Because essentially, what you're telling the artist in that case is that if you
find a big enough definition, it's all the same, that all could be included.
Kolbowski:Right, it's the problem of eclecticism masking significant differences.
Riley:For instance, I think that most people who go to the museum, let's say we're
talking about cultural tourism, are educated people interested in art. Even if
the Modern is, as currently configured, a virtual railroad car of experiences
that visitors pass by, I do think that when they come out they know there is a
difference between Picasso and Matisse. Just because they encounter these
paintings in the same way, they don't believe, without even deeply reflecting
on it, that Matisse and Picasso are the same kind of artist. Even so, I still
think we are bound to come up with a better way of showing these works
that doesn't collapse critical differences. And that's what my problem with
monumentality is all about. For example, the staircase at the Louvre with

20

OCTOBER

the Winged Victory at the top-that image is very strong in my mind, yet I
don't know what I think about that statue. I probably will never be able to
think critically about the Winged Victory because of the way it's installed.
Krauss:No one would ever be able to, and I don't think it has to do with the way
it's installed. It has to do with the fact that it's become an icon.
Riley:But maybe its iconic status is related to its form of display.
Foster:I respect this ambition, though it may seem limited, to insist pedagogically
on the distinction between Matisse and Picasso, and I respect it for this
reason: it might be that the primary mission of MOMA, now more than
ever, is to offer a fairly strict definition of modernism so that important
distinctions within it can be explored. That might not seem a very correct or
sexy goal right now, but maybe that's the thing it should do. For many of us
involved in contemporary art, MOMA was most provocative, even most
productive, in its recalcitrance. This discourse of accommodation, of inclusion, may sound great for the artist-but into what is he or she included? It
used to be Ahab against the Whale; now it isJonah in the Whale.
Hollier:When the Beaubourg was founded, it was seen as a way of creating civil
diversity through a modern art museum in Paris. But aren't we at a point
now when modernism and contemporary art are further apart than they've
ever been?
[General agreement on the part of editors.]
Foster:Right. Concentrate on the palace; make it a people's palace of modernism.
And forget the barn; in fact, burn the barn. There are other barns in this
country that work better for contemporary art-like DIA, or L.A. MOCA, or
maybe even the new New Museum.
Riley:I don't really agree, but I guess that's why I'm on this side of the table.
Krauss:Another way of asking the same question about whether MOMA should
hold on to the values of high modernism-which you articulated in your
lecture, as Hal points out, by sticking to this idea of the autonomous critical
individual whose experience is to move through space and judge, and not be
swept up in the totalizing discourse of monumentality-is to ask whether
the greatest thing this competition could do would be to present the person
who goes to MOMAwith a spectacular example of high modernist architecture
which MOMA does not have now. The architecture of the Pelli addition is
abject. Wouldn't it be a breakthrough to have a great museum with great
architecture?
Riley:I agree completely, and in just this instance I believe the Museum has much
higher expectations, architecturally,than ever before. To be fair to Pelli, when
that project was first discussed by the trustees, it was not called the museum
extension. It was called the real estate development project.
Krauss:OK, we don't have to beat up on Cesar Pelli. The fact is that here you are,
the curator of architecture in a building which is spectacularly bad, architecturally. A statement of great architecture would be a welcome change.

TheMOMAExpansion:A Conversationwith TerenceRiley

21

Riley: I agree. The Bregenz Kunsthalle [Austria] is an example of an institution

that is a great museum and has great architecture. Its collection consists of
work from the Minimalist and neo-Minimalist period. The architect and the
director clearly worked together in developing an architectural aesthetic that
complements the works, while still being very strong. It's an easy example,
because they have a very defined collection. The fear of architecture at
MOMA has been...
Krauss:... that it cuts down on flexibility.
Riley:Not just that. It's such a complicated transaction between the client and the
architect. There is a fear of going down that road. In a little project like at
Bregenz, the director and the architect can meet and talk one-to-one, over
and over. There has been a fear in the past at this institution that it's too
complex a process. What we've tried to do this time is to assure the leadership that you can actually have an architect actively involved and there can be
a process whereby the architect really engages in a dialogue with the
museum, to understand what it wants rather than going with a signature
architect and everybodyjust sits in their seats and waits to see what happens. I
want to go back to the issue of modernism/postmodernism. Certainly, the
whole postmodern debate would be completely reduced and less interesting
without a modern debate behind it. Every day I face certain decisions. For
example, I put the first piece of Godwin furniture in the collection, as well as
the first piece of American Stickley. Should I add a lot of American Art Deco?
Isn't that more representative of what happened? I know intellectually that
it's very difficult to come up with a rationale for continuing to keep Art Deco
out of the collection in terms of the debates which are going on now. At the
same time, to lose the clarity of the existing narrative would be a tragedy.
Kolbowski:Terry, I want to ask you to clarify something that seems to have become
confused in this discussion. Are you or aren't you calling for MOMA to
emphasize its archival function? It seems to me that what's important is not
so much the notion of upholding high-modernist values, but rather of
establishing analytical relationships to history and perhaps of establishing a
more measured relationship to the present. In the discourses of these papers,
that position does not seem to be there, and I thought I heard it in Hal and
Rosalind's comments, and in Denis's question about the discontinuity
between a lot of contemporary art and modernist art. But I suppose the
archival model of the museum is passe.
Riley:There is a problem with this notion that the museum should be specifically
archival. To go back to Rosalind's reference to Foucault, the fact is, for as
much as we might think it's programmed, the museum is really free space.
People do what they want to do in the museum.
Kolbowski:But the collection has already been preselected.
Riley: Having said that, among the many things that we know happen in the
museum, from people sleeping there, to looking at art, to having a meal...

22

OCTOBER

Krauss:... to picking each other up ...

Riley:... to picking each other up, we do expect that we have to accommodate
what will be an increasing interest in our archival mission. But that doesn't
mean that the museum should be an archive. That's a limiting definition,
this presumption that you have a space where anyone who has eight dollars
can go in and, totally undirected, will conform to some sort of particular
pattern of activity.
Kolbowski:
But archival function is not necessarily a negative limit, is it? Rather than
the modern museum having an overdetermining effect on contemporary
practices, the alternative would be to establish a certain distance from
those practices. Which is not to say that that role of the museum would be
value-free. Archival function has values and establishes its own limits, which
can be articulated.
Foster:But that would be the function of the museum in any case. To hold on to
the distinction between Matisse and Picasso is one thing. But that's not the
only thing. Another part of this archival function is to complicate the
Bauhaus with Art Deco. That's why to remain open to the present possibly
dilutes these projects. If you feel the pressure of the public in terms of
populist concerns of what shows would be understood, what shows would
draw people in, etc., etc., then you open up the museum not from the position
of the archive, but from the position of entertainment.
Riley: I don't really buy the idea that you do a blockbuster and a lot of people
come and that's how the museum world works. As I mentioned before, what
seems to happen is that a local and international tourist audience comes
because the museum has a reputation. Ironically, and this can't be proven, I
think that it's an adherence to a more critical position which actually leaks
out and becomes the "reputation" of the museum, which draws people who
have no particular destination.
Krauss:I agree.
Foster: Generally, people still go to MOMA to see the art. Many go to the
Guggenheim to see the building, and perhaps even more so to Bilbao for
that reason: again, architecture as spectacle, which in this case MOMA has
attempted to bracket somewhat. Now if we develop the potential of your
heterotopia a little, we have two models here, though this is a crude opposition. On the one hand, the hope of a critical space and a critical subjectivity,
a modernist engagement with difficult images, objects, ideas, displays, contexts. On the other hand, this bad object we have nicknamed Bilbao-the
spectacular corporate model. Between these extremes are additional
possibilities, maybe heterotopic ones, for other spaces and subjectivities
(where the question is not "we've got twenty bucks to blow-should we go
to a movie or to MOMA?").And for other publics too, publics not defined
simply as aggregates of individuals.
Riley: In the lecture I gave on the competition, I showed a slide of a section

TheMOMAExpansion:A Conversationwith TerenceRiley

23

through Louis Kahn's Exeter Library, a demonstration of how you could

actually structure varying degrees of activity. In the section of that library, in
the center, is a platonic circle, a common space, which you arrive at through
the entry, with everyone passing in and out. For a brief moment, everyone
who enters or departs is in an observable communal space. And then, as you
move away from this platonic center, with its symbolic possibility of some
kind of communal vision, there is a breakdown into more atomic spaces,
such as the stacks and at the perimeter, individual carrels. In a carrel you
can be by yourself. It has a window, so that you can look out and actually
deny what's going on inside. There is both a breakdown of space and the
possibility for the individual to both be alone and feel like they're part of
something, even if it's just the experience of being with a lot of other people
in the same place at the same time. The architecture provides a way of
negotiating these possibilities.
Kolbowski:I'm not sure that the program of the library is a good analogy, because
the space of contemplation and the particularities of circulation are already
built into the program of the library. The program of an art museum is more
open to interpretation. And unless you preset certain limits, as Hal and
Rosalind have talked about, isn't there a vagueness inherent in its program?
Krauss:Let me ask the same thing in a slightly different way. We talked about the
exhibition spaces mainly, and the big public entry, and the relationship
between the public and the exhibition spaces. But we know this museum is
much more than that. It also involves the separation of departments by
media, and a financial structure which is the support basis for the separate
departments, which guarantees the life of those departments, but also
rigidifies and reinforces their separation, so you have a drawings department, a painting and sculpture department, and a photography department,
among others. And, of course, one of the things that happened at the end of
the twentieth century is that many artists began to use photography. And
certain problems arose. I'm not saying this particular thing happened, but
what if the photography curator decided that Smithson's photography was
not interesting and therefore did not purchase it? Then the painting and
sculpture curators would not be allowed to purchase it either. So, those
things have become divisions which presumably will be perpetuated in what
seems to be a call for these very large study centers, which will be organized
around media.
Riley: Let me clarify something about the proposed interrelationships between
media. The core galleries are now being referred to as the museum collection
galleries and there will no longer be painting and sculpture galleries per se.
The museum collection galleries will essentially be the painting and sculpture
galleries with all other media as necessary to present what might be called a
coherent history of modern art.
Krauss:Are you, as architecture and design curator, happy with this?

24

OCTOBER

KunsthausBregenz.ArchitectPeterZumthor.
(Photo:HeleneBinet.)

ConstantinBrancusi.Newborn. 1928.

The MOMA Expansion: A Conversation with Terence Riley

25

Riley:Yes. Because there will also be departmental galleries for the other mediabased departments. Photography has an independent history, in addition to
its role in explaining a larger history of modern art. Architecture and design
have certain autonomous histories related to their disciplines. Besides, if we
totally integrated the collections, the first ten galleries would be photography
because the photography collection goes back to 1839. No paintings are
acquired until Cezanne. The first piece in the whole museum would be a
Wedgwood cup that I have ...
Krauss:If you laid the museum out chronologically, which you don't have to do.
Riley: But the fact is, you can't integrate the whole collection anyway, given the
various medias' independent histories.
Krauss:I think that one of the problems with the idea of a museum collection of
paintings and sculptures, with little injections of photography and design,
etc., is that the painting and sculpture narrative gets to be the dominant
voice in telling the story and some of its taboos are perpetuated. In 1927,
Brancusi cast the Newborn in stainless steel for the architect Jean Prouve,
thereby opening up-within the precious object orientation of his own
art-the idea of the multiple, the readymade, the serial object, something
that explicitly issued into that most taboo thing that you pointed to before, Art
Deco. Suppose you were to say, wait a minute, at this point in the narrative,
you're going to tell this other, taboo story, an interruption in the tale about
Brancusi that a lot of people don't want to hear, but which nonetheless is
fascinating.
Foster:Or the Bird in Spaceheld in customs as a manufactured object.
Krauss:Right. So, who gets to tell the story of the collapse of distinction between
Duchamp and Brancusi? Do you get to tell that story? Does the architect?
Riley: Remember, the modified core and satellite layout, the museum collections
galleries and flexible galleries, allow me two opportunities to participate in
the development of this narrative. One is by determining what pieces are
inserted within this narrative from the architecture and design collections. I
can see certain instances, as in showing the model of the Villa Savoye with Le
Corbusier's purist paintings with Leger, which make total sense. However, if
I'm interested in expressing the emergence of plastic in the 1960s as an
avant-garde material, I'm not sure the placements of plastic chairs in and
around other aesthetic contexts would be preferable to placing the plastic
objects in one of the flexible galleries, which is adjacent to this main story.
Kolbowski:My question is, have you or the trustees expected the architect to help
propose ways of telling these stories, or is the architect being asked to
comment on which story should be told?
Riley:Just imagine yourself renovating your own house. Would you ever act on
the assumption that you're a passive player or that it's the province of the
architect to determine how you want to live? In the optimal situation there is
a dialogue. The curators can theorize all this as diagrams and potential

26

OCTOBER

ideas about what a particular experience could be, but it's the architect who
has to come up with form.
Kolbowski:But there are at least two different models-aside from that of economic
optimization-for the client/architect relationship. For example, in relation
to your analogy of the domestic environment, I can pose the Frank house
[1972-75] designed by Peter Eisenman, which was not designed out of a
dialogue about needs or domestic habitation. It's about providing an irritating
container that confronts habitation. On the other hand, there is the model
in which a client expresses needs and ideas, likes and dislikes, and the architect
has certain ideas about what is relevant or interesting, or beautiful. It may
not be out of the question to use the first model.
Riley:You could. The Franks were obviously interested in a critical approach, and I
think that the fact that we can debate this at such length is because to a certain
degree MOMA has provided a kind of model of a critical institution.
However, the notion that we would submit to a totally passive role in
determining what the future of the museum is going to be is crazy. The two
museums that I can think of that really fit this model are the Wexner Center
by Eisenman [1983-89] and the Kunsthalle in Rotterdam by Rem Koolhaas
[1992]. Both of these buildings were completely designed, as far as I know,
without a curator or a director involved. The leadership, at the trustee level,
the people who had the money and the power, were in place. But who was
going to run the place? It was completely up to the architect to not only
deal with issues of form, but to imagine a program. And both of them are
unresolved museums for that reason. Both of them have incredibly awkward
spaces now, due to nothing more than the fact that what the architect imagined
the program might be just didn't correspond with what ensued.
Hollier:There was no interlocutor.
Kolbowski:I don't think either one of those museums has a collection, so the
question of awkwardness comes up as a possible positive point.
Riley: Actually, they're not really bad museums. What I should have said is that
the things that I found wrong with them are things that could have easily
been otherwise if there'd been an "interlocutor." Where do you think the
idea arose of the architect as an independent critic of their client, where
the client assumes a passive role and the best they can expect to receive
from the architect is not a reflection of their own needs or wishes, but a sort
of irritation?
Krauss:I recently lectured at the Wexner and was surprised at how well the museum
worked. And the Guggenheim is precisely such a model of irritation. I don't
think they had a program. They had Frank Lloyd Wright. There are lots of
museums that got designed de novo, and were imposed on their clients by
architects.
Riley:Are we talking about architecture per se or museums? I think the worst idea
that's come along is reflected in the commonly repeated comment of

TheMOMAExpansion:A Conversationwith TerenceRiley

27

Richard Meier that museums are the cathedrals of the twentieth century,
which I think is just an absolutely terrible analogy in every sense of the word.
Hollier:But that was the dominant model in the 1950s and '60s, wasn't it?
Krauss:Art was seen as a secular form of religious feeling throughout the course
of a certain branch of modernism.
Riley: But whether that's a truism or not, does one now need a new cathedral?
Isn't a cathedral representative of a unity of belief?
Foster:Cathedral or theme park-that elitist/populist alternative is exploitative at
all levels. A few minutes ago we were on to a provocative model-modernism
as a heterotopia-and a suggestive program-a transformed museum that
would allow for complicated narratives (the Bauhaus and Art Deco, Brancusi
and manufactured objects, etc.). This is a contemporary, retrospective view
of modernism that is neither the Barr model, which cuts across fields only
in its general boosterism, nor the Rubin mode of medium specificity and
aesthetic autonomy.
Kolbowski:
Hal, it seems to me that some of the ten projects of the Charette conform
to what you're saying. They do propose possibilities for intersections and
deviations.
Krauss:I think only the Tschumi scheme really takes this idea of a master narrative,
which is then interrupted, contradicted, complicated, etc., and translates
that into some architectural ideas.
Kolbowski:In the Herzog and de Meuron project, their idea of the conglomerate
seems to be similar to the analogy of the sponge.
Riley: Herzog and de Meuron and Steven Holl basically made a similar analysis.
They proposed two polarities. One was the notion of the museum expanding
essentially as it did before, which was the agglomeration of vertical pieces,
meaning each discrete addition is a vertical operation. They opposed that to
a horizontal operation. Bracketing versus Cutting. What the committee saw
in the Herzog and de Meuron scheme was an illustration of two different
polarities and by inference, there was everything in between. Obviously, the
committee was not so much interested in one or the other polarity, but just
the clarity of how you conceived of building on a built site.
Krauss:You talked about the strengths of the Herzog and de Meuron, and the
Tschumi. I'd like to hear about the strengths of the Taniguchi. I think he's
an academic of no interest.
Riley:Well I don't agree. Wasn't it you who asked for a high-modernist building for
a high-modernist museum? I think his work departs from a language of high
modernism, without being orthodox or commonplace.
Kolbowski:What happens to the idea of interconnection within departments with
the strong spine that's part of Taniguchi's Charette scheme?
Riley: The committee reacted to the first-stage proposals, and we actually
rejected the spine as inappropriate for two reasons. It's a reformulation of
the preexisting brownstone structure, which he seemed to derive out of an

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OCTOBER

existing urban morphology. But it's very limiting for the museum spatially,
and we also did not want the implications of the spine as a kind of linear,
horizontal organizer.
Hollier:You want the sponge instead of the spine.
Riley:We actually started to talk about a sponge with a spine.
Hollier:That's something God never created!
Kolbowski:It's interesting, because that dialogue between Taniguchi and MOMA
isn't about the architect reprogramming museum policy, but about the
architect coming up with an architectural solution that's rational but
inadequate to the representational aims of the institution. That sort of dialogue
has interesting potential.
Krauss:Have the results come in to the museum?
Riley:They're undergoing what's called the technical review-budget, zoning, how
closely they adhere to the needs analysis, although they were able to modify
things. One architect included an infotech space in the lobby, not unlike
what the National Gallery did in Washington, where you wander through a
library of computers as you go into the museum. I think that all three
architects did the best building of their careers. And by virtue of this dialogue
which resulted from the structure of the competition, all three of these
architects have designed compelling projects. You can't design something
wonderful until you understand not so much what the client is asking for,
but the motivation behind what the client is asking for. I think each one of
the projects is an incredible interpreter of the museum's future.

During the week of December20, 1997, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, Yoshio
Taniguchi, and Bernard Tschumipresented their proposals to the Architect Selection
Committee.Followingthe deliberationsof the committee,the Board of Trusteesendorsedthe
selectionof YoshioTaniguchi as the architectfor the museum'sexpansionand renovation.
An exhibitionof all threeproposalsis being presentedat the museumfrom March 5 until
April 28, 1998, and will travel to other venues thereafter.A full documentationof the
competitionprocesswill bepublishedby the museumin Studies in Modern Art, No. 7.