In June 2002, the Museum of Modern Art, which on the beginning of one of the periodic major renovations at its Manhattan venue – this time involving it entirely – made a move that may almost sound usual today, but 20 years ago would entail a rewriting of urban geographies, even in New York: the collection was moved to a temporary home, in Long Island City, Queens. The address was not yet a reference to the broad public – the gentrification in Brooklyn was just beginning, the gentrification in Queens was not even in sight, the current MoMA PS1 was already operating nearby but was an alternative project with reduced surfaces – and the institution had already purchased former industrial buildings in the area, to place its storage facilities. The opening to visitors of MoMA QNS – this is the name the venue has since retained – would then become one further step towards a different and innovative way of experiencing the city and its changing spaces, which has always distinguished the independent galaxy known as New York. Domus published the project in September 2002, on issue 851.

MoMA QNS, the temporary home of the Museum of Modern Art, takes that generously endowed institution back to its radical beginnings. Michael Maltzan has remodelled part of a factory in the outer New York borough of Queens, subverting preconceptions of the museum as sacred space as effectively as its first director, Alfred Barr, who once described MoMA as a bullet speeding through the culture.

Founded in 1929 to showcase art most Americans then recoiled from, the museum moved to its present address on West 53rd Street in 1939; it has embarked on a major expansion every 20 years or so and is currently doubling its size to 65,000 square metres. As the shock of the new wore off, growing crowds of residents and tourists meandered through cavernous spaces, engaging the art but also shopping, eating, catching a movie and hanging out in this vast covered piazza and its sculpture court. 

Critics complained that MoMA had lost its soul and its cutting edge. One response to that charge was an alliance with P.S.1, the alternative space that architect Fred Fisher created from a public school in Queens. Artists love the freedom it gives them, but the rooms are small and lack climate control. Yoshio Taniguchi’s additions to the existing 53rd Street site will accommodate more contemporary art and may give MoMA some of the serene grandeur that its rich trustees admire in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. However, for the three years of construction, they will have to cross the East River to a place they formerly glimpsed only from limousines en route to the airport.

For Maltzan, the journey inspired the design. It suggested a fresh start; a progression from opulent monumentality to what he calls a middle landscape – an anonymous industrial zone, constantly in flux, that is sandwiched between city and suburbia. MoMA acquired the 16,000-square-metre factory for off-site art storage, and Cooper Robertson & Partners (who developed the museum’s master plan) upgraded it to serve as a high-security, climate-controlled facility that could accommodate 30 years of growth in the collections. 

When a search for affordable display space in Manhattan proved unsuccessful, curators realized that the area of the Queens facility not yet required for storage, offices and a research library would work well for them. Maltzan, who was Frank Gehry’s project designer on Walt Disney Hall before setting up his own Los Angeles practice, was selected to remodel approximately a quarter of the building as galleries and public spaces. Working within the constraints of a box with few openings and a budget of only $3 million, he has created a kinetic experience that begins when visitors first glimpse the building and ends by transforming their encounter with the art.

Rooftop signs are part of the local vernacular, and sections of the iconic MoMA logo (designed by Milton Glaser in the 1970s and now shorthand for the institution) are painted on panels around the mechanical equipment. 

Most visitors arrive at an elevated subway station; as trains pull into the platform, the fragments seem to snap in and out of alignment. The sign thus becomes an interactive artwork, expressing the concepts of movement and ephemerality and suggesting that the identity of the museum is mutating. From above, the roof is the primary facade, and the sign generates a sense of place and anticipation atop a bland container. The building was re-skinned in the same blue as the painted brick that made the factory a local landmark.

Armatures supporting fluorescent tubes project from the wall leading to the entry, creating a staccato rhythm of linear lights on winter evenings. The show begins on the sidewalk, as it did in movie palaces of the era when MoMA was first established, and the canopy projecting above a giant logo sandblasted onto glass and backlit though an outer layer of clear glazing evokes a theatre marquee. Once inside, the orthogonal geometry ruptures and the barriers between circulation and display dissolve. The hierarchies of layered space common to most museums are absent. 

The canopy tilts; walls peel away and serve as screens for video projections. Stairs in forced perspective lead to a ramp that loops up and through the lofty foyer, exploiting its volume and linking shop, café and other amenities in a single forward sweep that adds a dimension to this emphatically horizontal building. Overlaid balustrades of steel mesh generate patterns of interference that add another element of movement to the surge of visitors. The ticket counter is set well inside beneath an open-ended, tilted space that can accommodate lectures and a diversity of projects.

The three galleries lead away from this project space. They occupy the original reinforced-concrete floor and are served by a loading dock that will admit the largest contemporary sculptures. Ceiling services are exposed and the pristine white walls can be reconfigured to encourage curators to experiment with their installations. The ceiling heights and lighting, however, correspond closely to those in Taniguchi’s larger galleries. The raw, flexible spaces lack all pretension and serve the art well – most particularly a selection of highlights from the permanent collection that will occupy one gallery until the museum’s Matisse/Picasso blockbuster claims them all in February. The other two galleries house, though mid-September, an exhibition of six iconic automobiles (a first for MoMA) and Tempo, a multimedia exploration of the notion of time. 

Like the beloved Geffen Contemporary in L.A., Gehry’s low-cost garage conversion that was planned to last only until Isozaki’s Museum of Contemporary Art was completed, it seems likely that MoMA QNS will also enjoy a long life. The museum has an option on a nearby building for additional storage, and the advantages of giving curators and artists a choice of rough or refined settings are as obvious as the political asset of having a significant presence in a working-class neighbourhood. The Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum, the American Museum of the Moving Image and other intrepid pioneers of Queens would benefit from the prestige and increased flow of visitors. Yet Maltzan confesses a certain ambivalence.

Although pleased by the acclaim, he regrets that his space may shift from temporary to permanent. ‘I was thinking of a World’s Fair, which resides in people’s memories long after it disappears’, he muses. And sometimes – as with Alvar Aalto’s pavilion of 1939 – enjoys a vivid afterlife.