Sunday, November 2, 2008

Museum of Modern Art : Ray Hollis Ashtray



The Museum Of Modern Art (MoMA), located in New York serves as a building that dedicates itself to modern and contemporary art. It was founded in 1929 as an educational institution. Some of the collections that the museum includes is architecture and design, paintings, photography, and films. The museum has recently gone through a new building change. It now consists of new spaces with the original architecture to considerably enhance the museum’s modern and contemporary art. Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi, designed the new building. A statement from Taniguchi said that his goal was to “transform MoMA into a bold new museum while maintaining its historical, cultural, and social context.” After reading the website I learned that the museum “seeks to create a dialogue between the established and the experimental, the past and the present, in an environment that is responsive to the issues of modern and contemporary art, while being accessible to a public that ranges from scholars to young children.”
The reason I chose this building to house the Ray Hollis Ashtray was because of how modern it is. The straight edges and simple form compliment the building itself. The exterior and interior components of the building help mimic not only the ashtray, but also the other pieces of art that sits within the museum. The placement of the collections inside the building is very simple making it easier for an onlooker to view the pieces without having distractions. The styles of both the building and ashtray compliment each other by the forms and linear edges.

Compared to the Nichols House in Boston, both are very different in some way. The Nichols House seems to be located in a neighborhood rather than in the middle of a city. The styles of the buildings contrast each other by the Nichols House looks like a place where someone once lived rather than a place that was built just to be a museum.

The National Gallery of Art building is similar to the Museum of Modern Art. The exterior forms are incredibly similar by the geometric shape. Another comparison is that both of the buildings serve as a place where people can go and look at artists/designers work from all different time periods. Both buildings were built for this specific reason.

No comments: