Landmarks in 21st Century American Architecture Series

Architect Yoshio Taniguchi, revered in his native country of Japan for the design of consummately minimal museums, won the much-coveted commission to expand and renovate the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1997.

Opened in 2004, the serenely elegant complex of taut, smooth glass, aluminum, and granite planes plays off the International Style vocabulary of the original museum building, designed in 1939 by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone.

In this tour, Taniguchi guides us through the museum, discussing his thinking behind the design of the six levels of galleries for the much-heralded collection of late-19th to early 21st-century art.

The tour also takes us up and around the dramatic 110-foot-high atrium, through the famous sculpture garden designed by Philip Johnson and landscape architect James Fanning in 1953, and ending in the new education and research center that Taniguchi completed at the garden’s East end in 2006.

Principal Funding provided by The Peter Jay Sharp Foundation