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It is impossible to impose a singular, abstract framework onto a messy, pluralistic world, yet the modernist museum has endured as a manifestation of this paradox. Throughout the 20th century and beyond, museums have both endured modernism and allowed modernism to endure. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the adoption of architectural and spatial language – clean, white, modular and neutral, that conveniently positions the modernist museum as a space outside context and bias, while in turn granting it a quiet authority as an arbiter of truth. As repetition turned into convention, modernism’s visual and institutional codes became naturalised, embedding within the cultural memory of how art should be encountered.
Even as modernism’s original utopian ambitions have faded, the modernist museum continues to retain its institutional weight, even when feeling at odds with democratic calls for multiplicity, relationality and historical accountability. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is a living site of this dynamic. Widely considered the first modernist art museum, it is both a historical product and a contemporary agent of modernist ideology. Throughout its successive expansions, MoMA has maintained its foundational modernist grammar. Its containment is elegant, and this reveals a powerful inertia: not resistance to change, but a capacity to accommodate it without rupture. In today’s world, the question is no longer whether modernist museums like MoMA can change, but how deeply that change is permitted to unsettle the structural ideologies that sustain its authority.
Modernism’s Institutionalisation
“Form ever follows function” modernism’s founding wager. Louis Sullivan’s dictum implied more than utility. Attached to it was a moral imperative, that form should no longer conceal historical lineage or ornamented identity; it should transparently express purpose, liberated from artifice. This aspiration toward functional legibility became, implicitly, a politic. What began in architecture as a material logic evolved to be modernism’s broader cultural method. Architecture would no longer gesture toward the past, but instruct the future. To understand this, we must examine the ideological load modernism carries. What distinguishes modernism is not only formal logic, but its claim to universality. Unlike movements of the past, whose forms were tied to specific worldviews, such as Gothic cathedrals aspiring towards the divine or Baroque palaces as a staging of royal power, modernism, by contrast, sought to dissolve symbolic weight. It presented itself as a neutral system, apolitical, ahistorical and hygienic. But this was a sleight of hand. The absence of overt symbolism was not the absence of ideology, but a vehicle through which ideology was naturalised.
Modernism’s claim to neutrality found its most enduring expression in architecture. Early figures like Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus group understood space not simply as a container for life, but a medium through which modernity could be shaped and systematised. The house, in Le Corbusier’s words, was a “machine for living”, a tool to rationalise daily life itself, imposing clarity and function not just on buildings but the lives lived inside them. Believing modern life had become disordered, cluttered by tradition and emotional excess, architecture, in his vision, was a way to discipline the chaos. This disciplinary function of architecture was not limited to domestic spaces. It extended into schools, offices and museums, anywhere modern life was to be reformed. In this way, the modernist building became an instrument for behavioural conditioning; a project of cultural engineering disguised as form. It was precisely this ability, to aestheticise order while naturalising ideology, that made architecture the ideal vessel for modernism's institutional future.
The canon for modernism in the United States was authored by The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) following its establishment in 1929. While not formally aligned with the Bauhaus, MoMA was profoundly shaped by its design philosophy. The belief that good design could shape a more egalitarian society resonated deeply with founding director Alfred H. Barr Jr.. Under Barr, MoMA became a vehicle for translating avant-garde European ideals and institutionalising Bauhaus ethos into an American museum and market language. Yet, as MoMA’s influence grew, the utopian and socially reformist ambitions that underpinned Barr’s Bauhaus-informed vision gave way to a more codified and aestheticised version of modernism, perhaps one closer to Le Corbusier’s prescriptive and disciplinary form of order. From the 1940s onwards, MoMA evolved into a powerful exhibitionary complex. Through its architecture and spatial design, MoMA has long disciplined, and continues to discipline the public by training them to see and be seen through the lens of modernist neutrality. Not only has this continued to reinforce the museum’s internal authority, but also advance its broader ideological alignment with capitalist modernity under the same guise of neutrality through which that discipline is exercised. To understand how MoMA became an exhibitionary complex, we must consider what MoMA’s architecture is.
MoMA’s ideological “mutations”, that is its early utopian beginnings, to its corporate nostalgia of the mid-to-late 20th century, to its postmodern spectacle and institutional branding of the late century charted a shift in which modernism at MoMA became a fixed figure of reverence rather than a progressive force. From its very foundations, MoMA’s architecture has embodied this shifting terrain. MoMA’s early architectural language did not merely reflect modernism, but constructed it by defining a canon that foregrounded its principles while sidelining its radical, political roots. Most notably, the 1932 Modern Architecture: International Exhibition assembled the world of European avant-garde figures such as Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe under the rubric of the “International Style”, a label that strategically reframed their designs as universal rather than politically or culturally contingent. This “world style” smoothed the path for modernism’s integration into American institutions and capitalist infrastructures at the time when avant-garde aesthetics were still viewed with suspicion. The socialist utopian foundations of avant-garde currents, like the Bauhaus and Constructivism, were ultimately incompatible with the United States consolidation of a national identity founded in liberal capitalism. MoMA’s version of modernism, purified of its revolutionary impulses, aligned more comfortably with the post-war narrative of progress and innovation.
Even in its earliest institutional articulations, this modernism appeared utopian in form but was already entangled in capitalist structures. This paradox was materialised in the Museum’s first purpose-built home: the 1939 Goodwin-Stone Building, designed by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone. While functioning primarily as a unifying element, smoothing over the diversity of its collections, the building stood as MoMA’s clearest architectural emblem for its Utopian modernist vision. The building's flat, unornamented limestone façade, varied massings and horizontal strip windows stood in stark contrast to the grand, symmetrical Beaux-Arts museums that dominated New York at the time (Figure 1). Inside, the spatial design was resolutely functional. Open-plan white-walled, “loft-like” galleries and fluid circulation routes with “track lighting and movable partitions” (Figure 2). It is this interior, later popularised and packaged as the white cube, that has most effectively enabled MoMA to indoctrinate modernism’s values. Far from being the neutral, timeless and unencumbered space it appeared to be, the white cube spatial logic internalises a modernist ideology under the guise of objectivity. It disciplines both the artwork and the viewer, by constructing a purified viewing environment whereby encounters are filtered through a lens of detachment and reverence. This model became so ideologically efficient and easily reproducible that it became the default spatial script through which MoMA’s modernism became naturalised. And yet, its power continues to endure, allowing MoMA to adapt to a changing world all while preserving its ideological frameworks.
Figure 1. 1939 Goodwin-Stone MoMA – exterior view. Photographer unknown.
Figure 2. 1939 Goodwin-Stone MoMA – interior. Photograph by Eliot Elisofon.
Modernising Modernism
When MoMA reopened in 2019 after a $450 million expansion, it presented itself as a museum rethought for the 21st century. A symbolic posture towards openness reflected Director Glenn D. Lowry’s broader agenda of flexibility, interdepartmental fluidity and a responsiveness to contemporary art forms. A hark back to the experimental spirit of Alfred H. Barr Jr., was in Lowry’s sentiment, that this expansion was not merely about adding space, but rethinking the experience of art in the museum. Crucially, this spatial-curatorial shift was staged most visibly in the rehang of the MoMA’s permanent collection. The most radical pairing, Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) juxtaposed against Faith Ringgold’s American People Series #20: Die (1967), symbolised MoMA’s attempt to reshape modernism’s canon through a broader, more self-reflexive lens. At its most generous, the rehang channels a postmodernist spirit: a deconstruction of the linear art-historical narratives and a step towards multiplicity. At the same time, MoMA largely retained the chronological framework that underpins its narrative of modernism, a decision that grounds these curatorial shifts within a coherent historical structure. This continuity offers visitors a familiar lens through which to trace the evolution of modernism, while preserving the educational value of the collection even as its presentation becomes more experimental. This hybrid approach, balancing historical progression with conceptual experimentation, reflects MoMA’s evolving understanding of modernism not as a fixed or singular narrative dominated by white Eurocentric men, but contested, multifaceted history.
However, it is questionable whether MoMA spontaneously decided to challenge its own curatorial conventions. By the time of its 2019 rehang, institutions like Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou and the Stedelijk Museum had already begun experimenting with reinterpreting their collections, responding to growing cultural demands for historical accountability. MoMA’s move was bold, its permanent collection isn’t only influential, it's canonical. To revise it, even incrementally, is to revise the history it authored. But was this act truly transformative in the way it should be, or ultimately self-serving? It is true that deep, lasting change must happen at the level of a museum's permanent collection and display. As these collections are inherited, and not erasable, it requires an institutional revision that occurs from within. Theoretically then, shouldn’t rehangs signal a kind of ideological recalibration? Not entirely. It not only involves reinterpreting collections but critically reviewing collections and shifting acquisition ethics. For example, the Stedelijk Museum’s approach was less sweeping, but arguably more introspective. While it didn’t perform a full rehang, it instead undertook a self-critical assessment of its collection’s geopolitical reach, openly asking whether its holdings reflected these realities.
So did MoMA too critically review its collections to confront its Eurocentric gaps, while actively building new partnerships and acquisitions grounded in that reflection? Instead, its energy seemed to centre on media sensation surrounding its notable spatial-curatorial gesture. It did, after all, review its architecture, just enough to ensure that modernist foundations continue to endure another renovation unscathed. In increasing its total gallery area by roughly 30%, the 2019 expansion introduced several notable architectural additions, among them the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio: a new performance oriented space dedicated to living programming. Located on the fourth floor as a “state-of-the-art space in the heart of the Museum”, encountered by visitors on their journey to the canonical fifth floor, after effortlessly meandering upward the black steel Blade stair. But before commencing their ascent, all visitors are first welcomed into another expansion of the central atrium, this time opening it more visibly to the street and merging it with new, porous street-level galleries which are free of charge.
But back to the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio, which marks quite the deviation from MoMA’s long standing allegiance to the white cube aesthetic. With its dark-walled interior and double-height windows, the Studio fulfills MoMA’s broader mandate for openness, in both form and function. It brings the outside world in while inviting embodied, temporal engagement, a marked departure from the disembodied visuality long encoded by the white cube’s logic. Yet this disruption was not born without compromise. The Studio exists as a scaled-down realisation of an earlier, more radical architectural vision, first proposed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro as the Art Bay. The Art Bay was imagined as a triple-height, glass-fronted performance space at street-level facing West 53rd. Originally intended to be a standalone architectural volume, its boldness in function and scale would have too radically disrupted the open, but closed aesthetic MoMA has historically embodied as part of its high modernist architectural principles. But does it really matter? Whether it was the ambitious unrealised Art Bay or the contained Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio, these remain relatively minor gestures when set against the sheer scale and endurance of the big white cube that MoMA is, and has always been.
The 1953 Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden by Philip Johnson marked MoMA’s spatial gesture towards openness: a modernist utopia, merging art with nature. The 1964 Philip Johnson and Richard Foster introduced large curtain-glass walls, visually connecting the indoor galleries with the garden outside. The 1984 establishment of the Garden Hall atrium extended this gesture further, as a glass-walled lobby that split the museum between its overlit, glossy throughout and enclosed white-walled sanctum of the permanent collection. Yet the most transformative moment came in 2004 with Yoshio Taniguchi’s redesign. A historic overhaul that doubled MoMA’s size, rendering the invisible cathedral into modernism's purest incarnation: light framed in glass, vast white walls, silent floors and invisible edges where space appeared to float. In Taniguchi’s famous words to the board of trustees, “Raise a lot of money for me, I’ll give you good architecture. Raise even more money, I’ll make the architecture disappear.”.
This is the enduring modernist paradox: MoMA, with its glass, gardens, atriums and open spaces, gestures towards a utopia of art characterised by transparency and accessibility (figure 3). A museum spatially opening up to the world, and seemingly far from the sterile, sealed environment the white cube traditionally represented. But this is the critical irony, that openness does not rupture the white cube; it completes it. What appears permeable is in fact a sleight of hand. As with modernism itself, the effect is one of illusion, and instead presents the white cube as an institutional shorthand, and a convenient, flexible package that both enables and restricts, adapts and conceals, projecting freedom of encounter while tightly curating its terms.
Figure 3 - MoMA’s architecture of light
Modernism as a Self-Legitimising System For Carol Duncan, modern museum architecture operates as a system of ritual containment, one that absorbs radical critique and converts it into institutional prestige. It has become the very ornamented identity it once sought to challenge, a rejection of excess refashioned into a new visual language of elite cultural capital. It is hardly surprising then, that MoMA has not meaningfully diverged from its modernist foundations. Why would it abandon the very structure that continues to secure its dominance? As established, modernism at MoMA has long functioned not only as a movement of the avant-garde, but as an aesthetic proxy for capitalist ideologies. The museum's architectural and spatial-curatorial strategies reinforce a model of power that is durable precisely because it is so absorptive. What results is an enactment of capitalist realism: “it becomes much easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”. Glenn D. Lowry, MoMA’s longest-serving director from 1995 to 2025, was a reformist figure, guiding the museum through seismic cultural and global shifts while overseeing two of its most extensive architectural transformations, while multiplying its endowment fivefold. Lowry captained the luxury ship through the storm without letting it rock too much, preserving institutional authority by packaging change within continuity. An impressive feat, depending on one’s definition of progress. This steady commitment to MoMA as a global cultural powerhouse became particularly clear with its demolition of the American Folk Art Museum (AFAM) in 2014 to make way for MoMA’s expanding footprint. Designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien in 2001, AFAM’s architecture was everything MoMA’s was not: a handcrafted bronze-clad façade, with a spatially compressed interior that centred vernacular and non-canonical practices. When the financial strain hit, it was sold to MoMA and promptly erased. An emblematic act, not only of institutional consolidation, but of the ideological dominance that renders alternatives unsustainable. Preserving AAFM might have been MoMA’s most radical act, not as a gesture of heritage or nostalgia, but as a living commitment to pluralism. Instead, the institution seized the opportunity to build upward. The result? 53W53, formally known as Tower Verre (ironically, Glass Tower in French) by renowned French architect Jean Nouvel (figure 4) . A luxury skyscraper of 77 floors, primarily residential with gallery space folded into its base. Originally dreamed up as a 1,250 monument to modernist ambition, it was ultimately trimmed down to a modest 1,050 feet. It couldn’t upstage the Empire State Building. This is symbolically delicious, that the sleek temple of avante-garde taste quietly genuflects before the enduring altar of capitalist grandeur. Perhaps an action of refined, elite taste rather than brute showiness. But is it elegance over excess or excess disguised as elegance? As Bourdieu would frame it, this is distinction rendered architecturally. MoMA’s modernist aesthetic has always been its most effective tool. It is a manufacture of distinction, making taste feel like knowledge and elitism feel like enlightenment. It offers the utopian environment that attracts those with the right cultural capital. That is its enduring power. What, then, has modernism become? Modernism as it originally emerged believed in utopia by design. Today, MoMA’s 1939 façade, although preserved, once a beacon of utopian aspiration, sits quietly dwarfed between luxury condos and the reflective panels of corporate glass . It is less a centerpiece than a grave marker, signifying MoMA’s performance of modernism’s afterlife. Modernism promised neutrality and order. What remains is not that promise fulfilled, but its aesthetic husk. An endlessly flexible, ideologically useful and perfectly suited for a capitalist cultural machine that now wears openness as its mask. Even as radically different architectural expressions emerged, like that of the Centre Pompidou, the same ideological structures persist. They have become a ritualised grammar across the Western cultural landscape, so naturalised they often go unnoticed because of how effectively they govern. That is modernism's greatest power. And so, in a final turn of irony, form still follows function, albeit now, an ideological one. |
| Jessica Tok |