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Installation view of Building Citizens (gallery 216), The Museum of Modern Art,
New York. © 2019 The Museum of Modern Art. Photo: John Wronn

NEW MOMA OPENS WITH A DYNAMIC PRESENTATION dynamic work from modern and contemporary architects and
OF ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN ACROSS ALL FLOORS designers.
OF THE MUSEUM
The Museum of Modern Art ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN IN THE NEW MoMA
The Vertical City, an installation in the Museum’s fifth-
floor David Geffen Wing, examines how the invention of the
New York, The Museum of Modern Art opens on October 21 skyscraper in the United States fundamentally changed the
with galleries dedicated to architecture and design across shape and experience of the city. By the early 20th century,
all floors of the Museum. Each of these installations explores Europe’s avant-garde architects celebrated America’s
different topics, extending a dialogue with the integrated bold conquest of height, but also remained critical of the
presentations of all mediums and chronologies throughout proliferation of competing towers in already congested
the collection galleries on the fifth, fourth, and second floors. metropolises. New building technologies prompted a
The location of the architecture and design galleries on each competition across the Atlantic to innovate structural
of these floors, as well as on the first and third floors, reflects approaches and ever-greater transparency. Several Frank
the curatorial vision of a “both–and” approach, acknowledging Lloyd Wright works, including models and drawings for the Call
architecture and design both as integral to the interdisciplinary Building in San Francisco and the St. Mark’s Tower in New York,
conversation with the visual arts and as autonomous serve as anchors in this gallery.
disciplines with specific histories and methodologies.
These new and extensive spaces allow the Department of Designs for Modern Life, also located in the Museum’s
Architecture and Design not only to explore the collection fifth-floor David Geffen Wing, takes an in-depth look at the
through changing themes in regular rotations, but also to ways in which new modes of living and working were being
mount topical installations that leverage the Department’s shaped throughout the interwar period in Europe. Margarete
holdings to address current disciplinary conversations and Schütte-Lihotzky’s Frankfurt Kitchen, which was designed for
public concerns. This new approach to ever-evolving collection- standardized housing blocks as part of Ernst May’s 1926–30
based installations ensures that visitors can always view New 2 Frankfurt initiative, serves as an important fulcrum point

14 WORLD of ART