New art walk: A most wonderful museum of modern art has been moved temporaily from central Manhattan to Queens, a radical re-evaluation of city and collection.

New York City is not Manhattan only, and the high-stakes New York art world is no longer confined to Midtown or Upper East Side galleries and museums. From the 1970s onwards, artists who once congregated in SoHo were displaced by increasingly commercial art galleries. Recently, many galleries have in turn been displaced by boutiques and lifestyle emporia (of the latter, Prada by Rem Koolhaas, on the corner of Prince and Broadway, is merely the most overt, AR May 2001). Land prices and street credibility have encouraged art's avant-garde to look beyond its previous hunting grounds and re-evaluate those post-industrial tracts common to most Capitalist cities.

So the august New York institution the Museum of Modern Art has come to Queens. In the late 1990s, the Museum (MoMA) organized a typically thorough campaign to select an architect to redesign and extend its historic premises on West 53rd Street. The winning strategy was the cool, possibly understated proposal from Japanese master Yoshio Taniguchi. Having closed its doors in May and now a complex construction site, the new MoMA is due for unveiling in 2005. In the interim, the Museum has opened this installation in Queens -- MoMA QNS (pronounced Q-N-S) -- in a staples factory converted to a comparatively small temporary gallery and permanent storage depot.

The primary external move is to position a multipart graphic of the letters 'M, 'o', 'M' and 'A' painted in white onto rooftop equipment painted black. Designed by Los Angeles architect Michael Maltzan, and implemented in collaboration with graphic designers Two Twelve, these letters form at first a fragmented montage above the communal datum of low industrial facilities. To orientate MoMA QNS towards the neighbourhood and visitors arriving from Manhattan, these letters coalesce in one instant only to read crisply as MoMA. With some cantilevered light fittings leading like a technological pergola from the subway station and Boulevard to its side street entrance, the essentially blank curtilage of MoMA QNS is painted a vivid blue.

Reminiscent of both that saturated blue favoured by 1950s French artist Yves Klein and the blue bricks that originally wrapped the factory, this blue combines with the rooftop letters to unequivocably signal the presence of MoMA QNS. The architectural project is in fact, in its own American professional way, the product of two practices. Michael Maltzan was responsible for these key exterior adjustments plus a rewardingly complex entry sequence; whereas New York's Cooper, Robertson & Partners, who first devised the master plan, have now designed many important elements not necessarily visible to a casual visitor (a conservation laboratory, library, staff offices, storage areas).

But it is Maltzan's promenade architecturale that establishes the institution's formal and experiential character. Into one quarter of the given rectilinear volume, he has inserted a broad deck with cloakrooms and lavatories below, a cafe and bookstore above on a kind of interior viewing terrace. A gentle, skewed flight of steps leads from an initially tight lobby onto an entrance landing. Visitors then turn through an acute angle to either descend a ramp (with its abstract ceremonial feeling) or take a shortcut upwards via an exposed staircase to the cafe and store. At its end, a narrower ramp leads down at right angles against the facing wall like a looping gangway from the cafe or an extended catwalk.

From entrance to exhibition galleries, protrudes an appendix-like supplementary gallery. This 'Project Space' ramps upwards in counterpoint to the main entrance ramp and is fringed by opaque walls that hover coyly just above floor level. These new insertions -- both the plastic interloping elements and the more prosaic partition walls within the main exhibition area -- are white, in most cases contiguous planes of white. The ceiling high above with its various structural and service elements is painted black, like the exterior roof. It becomes almost invisible (an ersatz night sky).

Exhibition spaces -- 25 000 square feet of the 160 000 square foot total -- are necessarily flexible to accommodate complex programming needs until 2005. With this inaugural hang ('staging' is perhaps a more accurate word for today's art), visitors seem drawn back, naturally, to the threshold zone between Maltzan's foyer and the inner galleries. This foyer, with its hints of Cubism and phenomenological promenade, is a newly evolving spatial type. The outer surface of its 'Project Space' serves as a dynamic screen for contemporary photographic and video projections.

At MoMA QNS the experience of movement and the experience of looking are conscientiously linked, both at the scale of individual canvases (the slightly surreal sensation of seeing Picasso or Matisse in an industrial shed) and of the host urban borough.

RELATED ARTICLE: Architect

Michael Maltzan Architecture, Los Angeles

Project team

Michael Maltzan, Kurt Sattler, Brian Cavanaugh, Dana Bauer, Nora Gorden, Michael Schulman

Associate architect

Cooper, Robertson & Partners

Project team

Scott Newman, Adele Finer, Ken Dietz, Anh Truong-Montgomery, Hiro Hayakawa, Eric Boorstyn, Hasti Azar, Weifang Lin

Structural engineer

De Nardis

Services engineer

Goldman Copeland

Photographs

Christian Richters