"I thought, dear, that you would rather have a live ass than a dead lion."

From my my vantage point, the greater NY metropolitan area appears to be underneath about 14 inches of the white stuff. This situation leaves me more or less confined to my home for the foreseeable future, so I thought I would take the opportunity to waste some of your time with fireside tales.

In other news, fans will now find my occaisional contribution over at Halfzie's Rodomontade.

Also: I didn't comment at the time, considering that this page had not yet been started, but I was able to attend one of the less fashionable parties celebrating the reopening of MoMA back in November. Perhaps now that the critical excitement has died down a bit (and I have returned for a visit myself during daylight hours), I might offer my own response to Yoshio Taniguchi's first major American commission.

First off, I should take a moment to dismiss this kind of nonsense. Many critics, in fact, have pointed out that the new design's most striking feature is its dogmatic modernism, as though this alone would render it anachronistic. While Taniguchi does adhere to orthodox modernist restraint in designing his details, the greatest drawback of the new building arrives only when it is viewed in larger pieces.

During construction, it was noted by some that Japanese architects are accustomed to a higher standard of precision than their American and even European counterparts. Sure enough, imperfection greets the eye at every turn in the new MoMA building. This is less true, surprisingly enough, for small detail pieces than for entire swaths of the building, like the 100-foot-tall white wall that forms the east side of the new central room. Viewed at nearly any angle, a grid pattern of irregular, bulging seams can clearly be seen. In other places, misaligned panels and areas that were never cleaned after construction call to mind a high-end mall in London, not a museum built to last for centuries.

But as tempting as it is to jump on the modernist-bashing bandwagon (as so many have done in the discourse of architecture since at least the 1960s), there is simply no denying that Taniguchi has succeeded in producing an excellent museum space. The lack of detail does a great service to much of the art, and for all of the construction problems, most visitors will scarcely notice anything amiss.

The building's most iconic feature is, of course, the renovated sculpture garden, which introduces both flexible symmetry and a coherent facade to what had been a hodgepodge of additions and older galleries. Staring at one another across the garden are the nearly identical modern (which is to say columnless) porticos of the institutional wing and the new gallery space to the east. Cut out of the 54th Street side of each, on the exterior of the glass curtain walls, a square hole provides glimpses of the ornate townhouses across the way. It is a coy, if contrived, means of branding the museum in a way that is at once graphic and spatial. (The invitation to the opening party also exhibited a square hole, punched into a corner.)

There is nothing wrong with the standard criticisms of early-twentieth-century modernism: it was indeed at times inflexible, unsustainable, impractical, aggressively masculine, and so on. However, Taniguchi is not some one-trick pony cribbing from Le Corbusier. His museum work (Nine Museums) will be on display through January 31.

Anyone who takes the time to look closely at Taniguchi's other museum work will begin to understand that he cannot be dismissed as simply "another modern architect." His designs are contextual, narrative, and varied in a way most early modernists were not. Aside from its sloppy construction (and, if you like, its cloying non-details like the square cutouts), Taniguchi's new building holds up extremely well alongside the very best contemporary museum architecture.