The Modern New York, New York
While the overall design of the Museum of Modern Art's 2004 expansion was by Yoshio Taniguchi, the museum tapped the recognized talents of Danny Meyer to operate the museum's greatly expanded food services and of Bentel & Bentel to design them — a collaboration that had been notably successful at restaurants such as Gramercy Tavern and Eleven Madison Park. The largest of the museum's new dining places, The Modern, is located on the first floor, with its own street entrance, so that it can function beyond museum hours and be a destination in itself. Its 322 seats are clearly divided between an ample area for the bar plus a casual dining area and a discreetly separated fine dining space, with a different menu. There is also a private dining room for special functions seating up to 64 (divisible into two equal rooms). For Bentel & Bentel, the commission presented a rich combination of opportunities and challenges. The major asset of the restaurant's allotted space was the view of the museum's celebrated sculpture garden through a 75-foot-long glass wall, and this outlook became a signature feature of the fine dining portion. Challenges included guiding arriving guests through narrow entrance corridors, either from the street or from the museum interior. And there was the further challenge of building within disparate structural systems and ceiling heights dating from three periods in the museum's evolution: its original 1939 building, a 1951 addition, and a swatch of the new 2004 construction. The earlier portions have low ceilings for such expansive floor areas, while a higher ceiling in the recent addition lends dignity to the fine dining area. It was considered essential to maintain a design kinship with the museum as a whole. Among its salient characteristics are: rectilinear forms, with occasionally radius-curved departures; flat white surfaces complemented by the muted sheen of glass and metal. The dark terrazzo flooring Taniguchi chose for the museum's main floor is extended into the restaurant, with areas of carpet or of hardwood like that of the art galleries distinguishing some areas. In the bar and casual dining area, reflective panels of stretched PVC mitigate the effect of the low ceiling, and a panoramic photomural by artist Thomas Demand along the far wall helps convert a space that could have felt confined to one that seems both intimate and indefinite in extent. See-through wine racks separate the bar from the entry corridor from the museum. Translucent panels of sand-blasted glass partially enclose the fine dining zone. The fine dining area has been laid out so that no seat faces directly away from the garden view. Sound-absorbing baffles are suspended from skylights in the high-ceiling portion of the space. Doors in the long glazed wall offer access to fair-weather seating on the terrace outside.
88
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online