Modern? Yes. But Not Exactly New

NEW YORK — More often than not, it is the losers who produce the great designs in big architectural competitions. The world’s best architects commit huge amounts of time and money to compete for prestigious commissions, and then chafe because selection committees all too often ardently embrace the most banal designs. Nevertheless, some competitions, because of their cultural importance and the vision of their planners, still inspire hope.

When New York’s Museum of Modern Art announced last January that it had selected a short list of 10 architects to design a major expansion of the museum, architects quivered with excitement. The client seemed ideal. The winner would rethink the museum’s entire campus--including all public and administrative areas. The building’s footprint will extend onto the adjacent site of the Dorset Hotel and two townhouses, which the museum purchased in 1996 for $50 million but plans to demolish.

The results of a monthlong study by each of the participants--which produced a series of conceptual sketches now on display at the museum’s architecture galleries--offer a subdued, conservative vision for MOMA’s future. If the schemes are shocking at all, it is for their timidity. The tightly controlled process did nothing to foster creative freedom. Nevertheless, this fall, MOMA will select a final design from one of three finalists, and then launch the ubiquitous capital campaign to fund it all--at present there is no budget for the project; that will be determined by the needs of the winning design.

How did MOMA’s good intentions produce such muddled results? The museum’s struggle to do the right thing says much about how hard it is to guarantee that a competition will produce a great work of public architecture today. For all the institution’s professed interest in bold experimentation, when it came to spending its own money, MOMA once again retreated into the conventional. Architecture, after all, always exists in the fuzzy realm between artistic intent and the hard realities of the real estate market. And as so often happens in the battle between vision and financial interests, creativity has lost out.

No museum has closer ties to Modernist architecture than MOMA. In 1934, the museum’s legendary International Style exhibition introduced the work of the great European Modernists to this country. Yet, MOMA has never been a patron of distinguished architecture. When the museum had the opportunity to test those visions with buildings of its own, it cowered.

Soon after the museum moved from its residential Fifth Avenue digs, where it first set up shop in 1929, to its current West 53rd Street location, Alfred Barr, the museum’s legendary founding director, proposed commissioning Mies van der Rohe to design a Modernist landmark. Unimpressed, MOMA’s trustees opted for the local duo of Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durrell Stone. Goodwin was a trustee. Barr resigned from the building committee in protest. In 1953, Philip Johnson--another MOMA board member and founder of the museum’s design department--created the museum’s one exceptional space, the sculpture garden, a sort of Modernist backyard that emerged as the museum’s only identifiable trademark. But already the museum was becoming a clutter of mediocre buildings and additions.

By 1985, a major addition had irreparably damaged the museum’s already shaky architectural identity. Spurred by a Rockefeller clan tired of paying off the museum’s annual deficits, the museum devised a scheme to fund its expansion through the complicated financing of an adjacent co-op tower bearing the MOMA brand name. A reliable commercial designer without great talent, Cesar Pelli fit the museum’s needs perfectly and he designed both the tower and the expansion.

More mall than museum, Pelli’s design is better suited to blockbuster shows and cocktail parties than the quiet contemplation of art. In his expansion, museum-goers peer down at the garden’s domestic bliss while gliding up its sleek escalators, and art groupies attend openings on its vast balconies--a perfect monument to the giddy self-absorbed 1980s art market.

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The current competition was hyped as a clean break from that unspoken history of failure. In early October, MOMA’s gang of four--the selection committee made up of the trustees Sid Bass, Agnes Gund, David Rockefeller and Ronald Lauder--left for a three-day retreat with architects Rem Koolhaas and Peter Eisenman, the enfants terribles of the architecture world. They were joined by Getty Museum director John Walsh, artists Elizabeth Murray and Richard Serra, and New Yorker essayist and art critic Adam Gopnik, among others, all recommended by the curatorial staff.

The retreat--held at an upstate Rockefeller estate--was a brainstorming session where the group discussed the meaning of Modernism and how to give physical shape to the museum’s views about art. MOMA was determined to produce a razor-sharp image for the coming century and to reconcile conflicts that had plagued the museum since its inception: How should the history of Modern art be told? Can MOMA be both a historical museum and an institution that stays current? Can a once contentedly elitist institution adapt to the growing masses of museum-goers?

While curators and trustees generally agreed on the institution’s greatness--”the foremost collection of Modern and Contemporary art in the world, period,” according to MOMA director Glenn Lowry--they were less sure about what their vision should be. They sought answers from architecture.

In November, Lowry, Riley and their trustees set out on Lauder’s jet on a remarkable tour of the world’s greatest contemporary architectural landmarks. Stops included most of the great works of the decade: Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum branch, nearing completion in Bilbao, Spain; Norman Foster’s contemporary art museum in Ni^mes, France; Jean Nouvel’s Cartier Foundation in Paris; Bernard Tschumi’s Film Institute in Tourcoing, France. They also visited the late Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute in La Jolla. (At the Salk, according to Riley, trustees joked that they had finally found their architect.)

The group seemed quick to identify what MOMA didn’t want. MOMA’s mid-block site, they reckoned, was not suited to “grand and monumental architecture,” Lowry said. So MOMA ruled out many of the world’s most talented architects from the start. Peter Eisenman and Arata Isozaki endured the indignity of having attended the weekend conference only to be dropped off the early list, as were Frank Gehry and Richard Meier--all perennial competition finalists.

Other big names--less known for sculptural excess--were ignored as well. Foster and Renzo Piano (Houston’s Menil Collection), to name two architects well-equipped to design sophisticated Modernist boxes, were dropped despite--or maybe because of--the fact that they have designed some of the world’s most distinguished modern museum spaces.

Still, MOMA’s final list of 10--Weil Arets and Koolhaas of the Netherlands, Dominique Perrault of France, the team of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron of Switzerland, Toyo Ito and Yoshio Taniguchi of Japan, and four New York-based firms: Todd Williams and Billie Tsien, Bernard Tschumi, Steven Holl and Rafael Vinoly--seemed promising.

Before the competition could begin, the 10 architects underwent three more days of group discussion at the museum and then were given a month to work out their schemes. Three architects made the final cut announced this month: Bernard Tschumi, Herzog & De Meuron, and Yoshio Taniguchi.

Of the three, Herzog & De Meuron’s sketches are the most amusing. With little irony, the sacred garden shifts to a more central and significant place up on the roof, turning it into a flagrant work of art itself, a nostalgic memorial to the museum’s past. In that version, the museum is packaged in a low, monolithic box, its roof an elaborate composition of more free-flowing spaces. The allusion is to the dreams of the early Modernists--a Corbusian block topped of with a natural landscape.

But perhaps the most telling proposal was by Koolhaas--one of the losers--who mixed blunt Modernist cliches with a measure of cynicism. An ode to the Modernism of Oscar Neimeyer’s Brazilia--that vast abstracted city of slabs and plazas--Koolhaas’s design lifted the museum up on columns to make way for a flat public plaza. He also sunk the garden into the ground, and in a cheeky act of cynicism housed MOMA’s offices in an opaque glass tower labeled MOMA, Inc. All in all, a fairly accurate analysis of the museum’s psyche.

If only that skepticism had gone further. Of the rest, perhaps Tschumi’s design offers the most promise because of its vagueness. Tschumi suggests inverting the traditional museum structure by placing temporary galleries at the center, and creating gathering points wherever various functions overlap. All three finalists adeptly summed up MOMA’s conflicted persona, envisioning 53rd Street--with its multiple facades--as the museum’s commercial face, and 54th Street as its more dignified artistic entry.

Many of the others’ proposed schemes adhere tightly to the Modernist creed. Projects by otherwise brilliant idiosyncratic designers like Toyo Ito and the team of Todd Williams and Billie Tsien are marked by simplistic solutions and little formal invention. What is missing is creative play.

In the end, MOMA has created a new form of tyranny. The relentless discussion, the length of the process appears to have become a chokehold around the creativity of the architects. The notion that presenting the work in a sketchbook format would be liberating led nowhere. Instead, the invention--often failed or unrealized--that the openness of traditional competitions engender, was lost.

In 1922, a competition for the design of the Chicago Tribune building--won by John Mead Howell and Raymond Hood’s false Gothic-clad tower--produced radically bizarre designs by European architects, particularly Adolf Loos’ tongue-in-cheek skyscraper in the form of a Doric column and Bruno Taut’s bulbous elongated pyramid design. All were briskly rejected. But they have become influential models in their own right. Architects today are more likely to be familiar with Loos’ scheme than Hood’s.

In France in the 1980s--during the heady days of Francois Mitterrand’s Grand Projects--Haussmann’s petit bourgeois Paris was invaded by bold 20th century monuments to the Socialist dream, almost all of them second rate. What was galling was that great designs like Koolhaas’s 1991 design for the Tres Grand Bibliotheque--arguably his greatest work to date--lost out to muddled proposals whose only virtue was their awesome scale.

Yet such losing designs are an important part of architecture’s culture. The openness of a competition that includes sometimes hundreds of architects, (the Tribune competition received 263 entries in all), is one of the most fertile grounds for invention. Often, winners’ names are forgotten. But the losers can still become powerful models of an architecture of possibility--models that are thoughtfully studied. MOMA’s determination to fine-tune the results brought about its greatest failure.

By these standards, Angelenos should be gleeful. After the fiasco of LACMA’s redesign in the 1980s, the city today is congested with promising projects: Richard Meier’s Getty Center, Frank Gehry’s resurrected Disney Hall, Jose Rafael Moneo’s Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral. All were the result of more standard competitions.

But such a convergence can happen only with luck. MOMA intended to offer a corrective to the vagaries of competition results. It wanted to ensure that the best possible design was produced, and then picked. But the keen focus they brought to the process only erased the possibility of unexpected creative leaps. It got them no closer to a great building. True courage now would mean going back to the drawing board.