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for rent JC apt - great space for an artist
"The first building that the Museum of Modern Art put up for itself, in 1939, wasn’ sumptuous, like the Met, or extravagantl sculptural, like the Guggenheim, two decade later. It was a crisp, blunt box. Philip L Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone’ International Style architecture was defiantl austere—a retort to the idea that museum should resemble grandiose palaces. The whit marble building burst out of a row of gentee brownstones on West Fifty-third Street, forcin its way into the Manhattan cityscape. It was matter of pride that the new building looke nothing like its neighbors
The museum’s idiosyncratic appearance was always a bit of a pose, however. Though the building’s original design emphasized its difference from the old architecture around it, the ultimate goal of the Modern’s curators was to make all the old stuff go away. In 1951, a new wing by Philip Johnson was built along the museum’s western edge, and in 1964 another, larger Johnson addition appeared on its eastern flank. The Modern grew again in 1984, with a new section by Cesar Pelli, who also designed a companion fifty-two-story apartment tower. And with the opening, this month, of the largest expansion yet, a four-hundred-and-twenty-five-million-dollar addition and renovation by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi, the Modern has pretty much taken over the block. The museum stretches along Fifty-third Street from just west of Fifth Avenue to just short of Sixth, and it reaches north to cover most of Fifty-fourth Street, too. You couldn’t ask for a clearer symbol of how modernism has moved from the cultural fringe to the mainstream. Not only has it been years since the art at the Modern has challenged anyone—its Matisses and Pollocks are beloved by all—but Taniguchi’s strict geometries of stone and glass feel as conventional as a Doric colonnade."
dr leslie and the composing room