Modern love?

NEW YORK -- Don't go for the architecture. Go for the art.

It's great to walk into the new, greatly expanded Museum of Modern Art in New York, which opens to the public Saturday, and see all the old friends on the walls, those paintings that have become as much a part of the lives of many of us as our neighbors and relatives. They're beautifully displayed and lit, and they're a joy to welcome back.

The architecture, though, is a letdown. It isn't bad, it's just uninteresting. It's the old MoMA all over again, only bigger. Here are the same-old same-old white walls and ceiling track lights, and then more white walls and more ceiling track lights. You feel like a lab rat in a snow maze. There's no attempt to create memorable architectural space for the artworks to inhabit. Instead, seeing them spotlighted on these placeless, anonymous white walls is like seeing isolated images on a screen in an academic slide lecture.

The architect is Yoshio Taniguchi of Japan, 67, whose design won in a rigorous competition with other invited architects. The MoMA was looking for a newcomer, not an established star, and this is Taniguchi's first building outside Japan. He's been quoted as saying he wanted to make the architecture disappear, and he's pretty much done that. The detailing is often elegant, but it's the kind of elegance that hides things. Walls, for example, don't seem to meet the floor or ceiling. They are separated by recessed shadow joints that make them appear to float, as if they had no mass or weight -- as if they were, in fact, projection screens.

The overall organization is simple. All of the old MoMA has been either demolished or renovated; it's now seamless with the new addition. The ground floor is a lobby and restaurant space, the second floor has the highest ceilings and shows the newest work, and then as you work your way upward you move backward in time, so that the early modern work, the beloved Cezannes and the like, are near the top. The uppermost gallery floor, the sixth, is another tall space for contemporary art. This is the only mildly interesting gallery, with a couple of standard skylights and some fat columns that suggest the possibility of a richer spatial experience. Still higher are smaller floors for museum offices.

Taniguchi does make a couple of gestures to break the monotony. One is a tall atrium space that rises upward through the middle of the museum from the second level. As you traverse the galleries, you come to places that overlook the atrium. You also encounter rectangular wall openings that open views into it. The hope is that the atrium will keep you oriented, because you'll always know where you are in relation to it. It doesn't work. I guarantee that every visitor will wander lost at one point or another. And the acoustics in the atrium are so reverberant that already it has proven unusable for social gatherings.

The other gesture, first suggested by Bernard Tschumi, former dean of the architecture school at Columbia, is what Tschumi calls "chutes and ladders," after the children's game. These are vertical shortcuts, stairways from one floor to another, enabling you to quickly bypass what you don't want to see without returning to the central escalators. They're a response to a criticism sometimes made of the old MoMA, which was that once you entered the galleries there was only one way through them, a "conveyor belt" on which you felt trapped. The chutes and ladders, by contrast, give you a not unpleasant sense, since you're probably lost anyway, of being an explorer in uncharted tundra.

The MoMA has deliberately chosen not to follow the path of some other famous museums, such as the two Guggenheims in Bilbao, Spain, and New York, where the architecture calls attention to itself and sometimes upstages the art. Taniguchi's work avoids that kind of flamboyance. His architecture is that of the high period of modernism in the middle of the last century, a world of floating abstract planes, of collage and transparency. Taniguchi loves semitransparent glass walls that resemble scrims or diaphanous veils. He also likes the kind of generic loftlike space that doesn't shout its presence, but instead lets the contents be the statement.

There's nothing wrong with any of that, up to a point. But then you think of some other museums of recent years and what they accomplish with light. The Kimball Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and the Yale Center for British Art by Louis Kahn; the Kunsthaus in Bregenz, Austria, by Peter Zumthor; the Beyeler Foundation in Basel, Switzerland, and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, by Renzo Piano; the Dia:Beacon in Beacon, N.Y. -- these and others bring daylight into a relationship with the art in a way that seems to charge the very air with life. Once you've experienced that, the old white-wall, track-light gallery feels cramped and inadequate. The difference can be subtle: The Dia, for instance, is all-white too, but the white comes in several delicately different shades, flooded with daylight that modulates with the weather. Of course, the MoMA doesn't have the advantage, as most of these others do, of being a single-story building with the possibility of skylights everywhere. But it doesn't even take full advantage of the top floor it does possess, unlike the marvelous multistory Yale museum. The Bregenz museum is multistory, too.

A minor problem with the minimal aesthetic is that it foregrounds stuff you don't want to see. Things like the backlighted red exit signs obtrude themselves as if they, too, like the sometimes similar Ed Ruscha paintings, are works of art. Doors and access panels are cut into walls and ceilings without frames, in the hope of making them disappear. Of course they don't; they merely mess up the minimalist perfection.

This writer gravitated to the galleries that display architecture and design. Here the objects -- classic modern chairs, lamps, a motorcycle, a car -- now stand on what appear to be floating ice floes, white raftlike shapes that separate you from the objects, as if you are looking at them across water. The objects are superb, but the floes present them self-consciously, as if they are carefully arranged store merchandise. I don't know the right way to show, in a museum, objects that were originally created to gather with other objects in useful and harmonious living rooms. But treating them as isolated art objects isn't it.

It should be noted that Taniguchi, almost from the moment he won the MoMA competition, worked in close collaboration with the New York architectural firm Kohn Pedersen Fox, as well as with a committee of MoMA curators. KPF is largely responsible for figuring out how to build Taniguchi's delicate kind of architecture in the sometimes brutal world of New York construction. Knotty problems included, for example, threading the new addition through the lower three floors of Museum Tower, an apartment high-rise. Those floors are now part of the museum. You can learn more about Taniguchi from a fine exhibit on the third floor about nine of his museums in Japan. A few of the MoMA's public spaces, such as the museum store and the cafe and restaurant (not yet open), were designed by other architects.

My final problem with the MoMA is the exterior. You can enter from either side, on West 53d or 54th Street, into a vast, rather featureless lobby that runs all the way through the building and opens out sideways to frame a view of the famous sculpture garden designed in 1953 by Philip Johnson, now restored. The 53d Street frontage is unmemorable but pleasant, thanks largely to the fact that it includes the restored facade of the 1939-era MoMA, by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durrell Stone. The older facade provides variety and a sense of time. The 54th Street frontage, on the other hand, is hideous. MoMA now occupies most of a city block, and this frontage is one huge blank wall -- some black, some white, some glass, interrupted only by the entrance and by a service dock. Nothing about it responds to the fact that it's on a lively midtown Manhattan street. It's deader than the back of a big-box retailer in Omaha.

"It's all about the art," one curator said to me. Yes it is, and that's too bad. MoMA's new building should also be about the quality of the space and light the art inhabits. And it should be about the city the museum lives in.

Robert Campbell can be reached at camglobe@aol.com.