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Made-Over MoMA Rearranges The Furniture, And the AttitudeFor its 75th birthday next month, the Museum of Modern Art is giving itself a serene new home and an explosive new design mission: to move beyond the Bauhaus.
The 630,000-square-foo t complex at 11 W. 53rd St. opens to the public Nov. 20. Tokyo architect Yoshio Taniguchi has delivered a cool bento box of black marble, green slate, aluminum and glass. But there is nothing sedate about the way curators have suspended an icon of American design -- a 1945 Bell 47D-1 helicopter -- over the grand staircase.
"This is our Winged Victory," said Terence Riley, chief curator of architecture and design, recalling the Greek marble that dominates a staircase at the Louvre.
An even bolder statement about the direction of the world's most influential design collection awaits on the third floor. Giving a private tour last week, Riley dodged construction workers and plastic sheeting to show off the freshly installed Philip Johnson Architecture and Design Galleries. There was not a Barcelona chair in sight. Indeed, MoMA, bastion of early-20th-century modernism, is offering Apple's iPod and Aibo's robot dog as pillars in the new temple of good design.
"We're combating the idea that the Bauhaus was the only thing happening," Riley said of the famed German school of applied arts, where Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe gave b
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October 31, 2004 | Viewed 13,094 time(s)
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