The New MoMA Is Bigger, More Diverse, and More Open to the City

Women’s empowerment, concentrated wealth, Instagram tourism, Black Lives Matter, and evolving gender expression: These are some of the topics engaged by the new Museum of Modern Art, which reopened Sunday with 47,000 more square feet of gallery space after a $450 million expansion and renovation. Growth brought an opportunity for the museum to reexamine the triumphal pageant of Modernism that has long been MoMA’s calling card. In its renewed, larger space, it has not only improved circulation around the galleries, but broadened and deepened the story of modern art.

To design the overhaul, MoMA selected architect Diller Scofidio + Renfro, working with the corporate architect Gensler. Back in 2014, jaws dropped when the museum announced this ambitious two-phase expansion, barely 10 years after it transformed every square inch of the museum, as well as erecting a major curatorial facility in Queens. In 2004, Tokyo architect Yoshio Taniguchi expanded the museum by 252,000 square feet, in the process largely obliterating a 1984 overhaul by César Pelli and removing almost all interior traces of the original 1939 building by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durrell Stone, as well as additions from the 1950s and 1960s by Philip Johnson.