MoMA Museum of Modern Art

MoMA – the Museum of Modern Art in New York – is considered the world's leading modern art museum. The original idea for the museum, developed primarily by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (the wife of John D. Rockefeller, Jr.), became reality and opened to the public on 7 November 1929. It was first hosted in six rooms divided between galleries and offices on the twelfth floor of the Heckscher Building in Manhattan, at the corner of 5th Avenue and 57th Street, and then moved to three further temporary spaces over the next ten years. In 1937, MoMA moved its offices and galleries to the Time-Life Building in Rockefeller Center. This is the museum's current site, although the architecture housing it was renovated and redesigned in later years. Today, its collection provides a peerless survey of modern and contemporary art worldwide, comprising architecture, design, drawings, paintings, sculpture, photographs, lithographs, illustrations, film and multimedia works. With more than two million visitors each year, MoMA is one of Manhattan's main attractions, in part due to its extraordinary architecture: a square block of five buildings including the new east wing (Gallery and Office Tower) and the older buildings in the centre. The complex housing MoMA was the subject of a major restoration and modernisation project between 2002 and 2004. Japanese architect, Yoshio Taniguchi, was selected to redesign the structure. The new building has almost twice the available space, gaining nearly 58,000 square metres, enriched in part with Zimbabwe Black stone cladding supplied by Savema Spa of Pietrasanta.

Useful links

• www.turnerconstruction.com
• www.flickr.com
• www.moma.org
• www.savema.com