MOMA Hires L.A. Architect to Design Its Temporary Home

New York’s Museum of Modern Art has selected Los Angeles architect Michael Maltzan to design a 50,000-square-foot temporary museum in Long Island City, Queens. The museum, which is scheduled to open in a mere year and a half, will serve as MOMA’s home during the final phase of construction on a $650-million planned expansion of its landmark 53rd Street building in Manhattan. The commission will be Maltzan’s first major project outside Los Angeles.

The MOMA project caps a string of successes for the 40-year-old Maltzan over the last two years. He cut his teeth as an architect in Frank O. Gehry’s Santa Monica office during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, where he was the project designer for the Walt Disney Concert Hall. After leaving Gehry’s office in 1995 to launch his own firm, Maltzan began work on a series of major projects in Los Angeles, establishing a reputation as a designer of remarkable rigor and maturity.

In 1998, Maltzan completed Harvard Westlake School’s Feldman/Horn Center for the Arts, an elegantly sculpted composition of light-filled classrooms and communal space. He is working on two museum projects, the renovation of the UCLA Hammer Museum in Westwood and the new Kid’s Space Children’s Museum in Pasadena. Maltzan’s design for the Hergott/Shepard residence in Beverly Hills, which was completed last year, was recently featured in MOMA’s “Un-Private House” show.

For the MOMA commission, Maltzan will renovate part of a manufacturing building the museum purchased last year. Its intent was to use the Queens site for a study center and art storage facility, but when it became apparent that the 53rd Street building would have to be temporarily shut down to complete the expansion, MOMA decided to transform nearly half of the facility into exhibition space. Although that will mean art lovers will have to travel to Queens, it links the museum to Long Island City’s budding art scene. Maltzan won the commission over three other firms: the New York team of Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture; Winka Dubbledam Archi-Tectonics; and Preston Scott Cohen.

“The Modern has always had a commitment to promoting the work of younger architects, and we were looking for someone whose architecture typified a new age,” said Terry Riley, MOMA’s chief curator of architecture and design. “Maltzan’s work is an excellent example of that. It deals with that middle landscape, neither suburban sprawl nor high-rise metropolis, that seems perfectly suited to the Long Island City site.”