The expansion, developed by MoMA with architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, in collaboration with Gensler, adds more than 40,000 square feet of gallery spaces and enables the Museum to exhibit significantly more art in new and interdisciplinary ways.

The Studio in the heart of the Museum will feature live programming and performances that react to, question, and challenge histories of modern art and the current cultural moment. An innovative second- floor Creativity Lab for education will invite visitors to connect with art that explores new ideas about the present, past, and future. Street-level galleries, free and open to all on the expanded ground floor, will better connect the Museum to New York City and bring art closer to people on the streets of midtown Manhattan.

Museum founded and opens in the Heckscher Building at 730 Fifth Avenue

Seeking more space, the Museum moves to a five-story townhouse at 11 West 53rd Street, owned by John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller

The Museum marks its 10th anniversary with a new “International Style” building designed by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone at 11 West 53rd Street [»link]

The Philip Johnson extension is completed [»link]

Cesar Pelli extention is completed [»link]

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center becomes an affiliate of MoMA

The newly expanded and renovated Museum, designed by Yoshio Taniguchi, opens to the public at 11 West 53rd Street, marking the Museum’s 75th anniversary year [»link]

January 2014

MoMA announces selection of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, in collaboration with Gensler, as designer of 2019 expansion

October 2019

MoMA opens its newly expanded and renovated Museum marking the Museum’s 90th anniversary year

Elizabeth Diller, founding partner of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, said:

“This project has called on us to work across MoMA’s rich architectural history, incorporating the Museum’s existing building blocks into a comprehensible whole through careful and deliberate interventions into previous logics, as well as the construction of new logics that arise from MoMA’s current aspirations. This work has required the curiosity of an archeologist and the skill of a surgeon. The improvements will make the visitor experience more intuitive and relieve congestion, while a new circulation network will knit together the expansion spaces with the lobbies, the theaters, and the Sculpture Garden to create a contiguous, free public realm that bridges street to street and art to city.

The design integrates the various facets of the Museum’s architectural history, creating a distinct clear-glass façade on 53rd Street that complements the existing Goodwin and Stone, Johnson, and Taniguchi buildings and invites a more open dialogue between interior and exterior spaces.”

Glenn D. Lowry said:

“The Museum of Modern Art’s renovation and expansion project will seek to reassure and surprise. Our curators and the architectural team have spent more than two years in conversations about the nature of our collection, the history of our installations, the continually changing nature of art, and our opportunities and responsibilities for engaging our audiences. The outcome of these discussions is a design that accommodates a global view and new perspectives on modern and contemporary art, and that embodies the metabolic and self-renewing nature of our institution.”

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