In 1999, the Museum of Modern art undertook a major $858 million expansion of its historic Manhattan facilities. The museum needed to create a temporary space to house the museum’s collection that would maintain its identity and membership loyalty while its permanent location closed for renovation and expansion. MoMA QNS would serve as a temporary exhibition space in a visually inventive way, but be able to quickly convert back to its original program as a site for museum support, preservation, and collections storage.

Located in a former Swingline Staples factory in Long Island City, Queens, the new facility includes the usual museum components: exhibition galleries, study centers, offices, a bookstore and a cafe, as well as research and storage facilities that will continue to be used after the new museum opens. Completed in 2002, MoMA QNS design can be seen as developing along three primary avenues of investigation. The museum’s context is a transitional landscape, with neither the traditional identity of the urban center nor of the suburban landscape.

Los Angeles architect Michael Maltzan designed the lobby and exterior signage in association with Cooper, Robertson & Partners of New York while the galleries themselves were designed by an in-house team at the Museum of Modern Art. The design team transformed the factory into a museum facility with a highly visible public face. Rather than simply foreshadowing the soon-to-be-remade midtown MoMA, the experience of movement became a central theme for the design of the building.

Most visitors arriving in Queens from Manhattan will come by train. The mechanic equipment boxes on the roof of MoMA QNS are painted with bold supergraphics to spell out the name of the museum when seen from the moving carriage of an elevated train. When the train moves away the letters are disappearing again. The experience of MoMA QNS, therefore, starts before the visitor has set foot through the door into the lobby, from an elevated entry sequence to the ticket area, coat check, and even public restrooms.

The critical significance was the transformation of the Museum’s temporary nature into its most important asset. Maltzan’s design of angling ramps and stairs amplifies the natural focus on procession and movement within the museum, gives way to MoMA QNS’ more dynamic identity, created by an extended procession which begins even before visitors arrive and continuing through each of the Museum’s galleries. Slanted walls compress the route visitors take on their pathways, channeling their attention again to the act of movement.

The factory’s original blue color, which had a strong recognition value in an otherwise unremarkable context, was intensified. This amalgam of the familiar and the new, when combined with the scale of the building, created a simultaneously iconic and abstract presence and a series of new relationships within the context’s overwhelming heterogeneity. Facing the challenges of a relatively limited budget and an ambitious and inviolate schedule, MoMA QNS creates an extended choreography in what is otherwise a transitional zone, where the temporary is re-situated within a temporal, contemporary context.

State-of-the-art conservation labs, digital-imaging studios, archives, and storage facilities reflect the institution’s high ideals and will continue to be used at this site after the museum returns to its permanent home. The success of the MoMA QNS is easy to see. The large number of visitors to the new galleries exceeded projected estimates, while staffs are enjoying working in the new space, and museum membership has remained steady despite the move.

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