Overview

About Museum Tower, 15 West 53rd Street

This tall condominium tower was created as part of a major expansion in 1985 of the Museum of Modern Art, or MOMA as it is known.

Architect Cesar Pelli's 1985 reconstruction of the museum to accommodate the new high-rise condominium apartment tower to the west incorporated a major expansion and redesign of the museum. The mixed-use expansion worked quite well visually from the garden where it cascaded downward from the tower rather like an angled, as opposed to bulbous, Beaubourg Museum.

One critic, Vincent Scully, however, was not amused: "...the flapping piece of flashing with which it is tenuously connected to the roof of the older building can hardly be credited," adding, in his book "American Architecture and Urbanism," revised edition, 1988, Henry Holt and Company, that the tower's "bulk severely compromises the privacy and scale of the sculpture court behind it...." Actually, the cascading skylights referred to by Scully bear a remarkable similarity to famous treatments by architect James Stirling and are the best feature of the Pelli expansion.

Ten years later, the museum announced it would be expanding again and had acquired the adjacent Dorset Hotel on West 54th Street and some other low-rise properties.

In December, 1997, the museum announced it had chosen an expansion plan by Yoshio Taniguchi, a not-well-known Japanese architect who had been one of ten finalists in a competition.

Taniguchi's design affected the base of Museum Tower by redesigning part of its façade on 53rd Street and removing Pelli's cascading glass atrium in the museum overlooking its famous garden. By removing the atrium, the tower had a more pronounced interface with, and higher visibility from, the world-famous garden, perhaps the most beloved and best urban space in the city.

While the Tanigucui new expansion cause some disruption for residents of the tower, the removal of the atrium did not affect them as they did not have direct access to it.

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