For all its vastness, the new Museum of Modern Art is barely perceptible from 53rd Street, where a fresh segment of blank gray wall has joined a parade of facades from the museum's various expansions. From Newsday
"I have an ego, but not so much," says Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi, standing on the chilly sidewalk in front of the museum, itemizing the layers of history. First came the pearl-white 1939 building by Goodwin and Stone, then in 1960 a small black wing by Philip Johnson, then Cesar Pelli's looming Museum Tower in 1984 and now Taniguchi's sleek connective tissue.

"I like to make myself very humble on the street," he says. "I tried to be very simple, and put all of my energy into creating the interior space. When you go inside, you have to get excited gradually until your encounter with the works of art. It's like a piece of music: If in the beginning you make it too strong, you get overwhelmed; it has to increase until you approach the finale."

Taniguchi, who has been commuting from Tokyo since he won the competition in 1997 to design the new MoMA, slips into a service entrance and moves through the spaces he designed, looking slightly astonished on his first tour of the completed museum. He winces from time to time, pointing out the evidence of battles he has lost - a wall where a window should be, a glass wall he would prefer to have closed off - and the places where, even with a $425-million budget, corners had to be cut.

"I don't like that door; it should be invisible," he mutters. "I should have separate fund-raising just for doors."

Taniguchi consoles himself: "If the concept is strong enough, the details don't matter." But in a building as spare and refined as this one, details matter enormously, and most of them are near-perfect enough to attract almost no attention.

Terence Riley, the museum's chief curator of architecture and design, has a well-plowed story about Taniguchi's self-effacement: "After he won the competition, Yoshio says to me, 'If you raise a lot of money, I'll give you very good architecture. If you raise really a lot of money, I'll make the architecture go away.'"



'Architecture hiding itself'

It sounds like a gnomic paradox, but the concept of invisible architecture translates into a constellation of expensive decisions. Riley pointed to a black granite wall whose panels are so large and meticulously aligned that the joints all but vanish, creating the effect of a seamless curtain. "When the light hits it a certain way, it looks like velvet," Riley says. "This is architecture that's all about hiding itself."

To Taniguchi, who until the MoMA commission had worked exclusively in Japan, the goal is not neutrality or blandness, but serene inconspicuousness. "Architecture is a container for people or for works of art," he says. "It's a frame, and in modern art you don't want to emphasize the frame. Here it doesn't have any particular form, only straight lines. I tried to create not a shape, but an environment."

Only once does he allow himself a glimmer of self-congratulation - and even then, it's for a space he has preserved, not one he designed. "I really did a good thing here," he says, standing in the original lobby, which now serves as a staff and restaurant entrance.

His pride lies in having fought to see it restored to its prewar glory. Daylight from 53rd Street washes through translucent panels of Thermolux. A sinuous counter echoes the wave of the silver canopy outside. "I might have lost this struggle, but it was very important to me," he says softly. "I had to be very loud."



A modern throwback

Taniguchi's fixation on archaeological preservation, like his fondness for modernist minimalism, seemed like a throwback in 1998. Then, many critics thought MoMA would follow the lead of the Guggenheim and turn to a flamboyant celebrity architect such as Frank Gehry, who had just famously bestowed on the Spanish city of Bilbao a museum as urban sculpture.

In choosing Taniguchi, who was almost completely unknown in the United States, the Modern hoped to build itself a classic and convince the public that the whole concept of the cutting edge in architecture had become passe.

"The expressionistic architecture of the so-called avant-garde, like Frank Gehry or Rem Koolhaas, has now become the norm: It's what everybody wants," scoffs MoMA's director, Glenn Lowry. "They've been co-opted by the establishment, and therefore I think in many ways the kind of architecture that Yoshio practices is far more daring. When there's a rush to do things in one way, there's always going to be a countermovement, and that countermovement is as radical as the so-called avant-garde."

Taniguchi seems amused by the controversy. "Am I conservative or radical?" he asks. To claim to be either would be to shift attention from the art to the architecture, from the content to the wrapper, from the work to the man. So the question just hangs there, to be answered or made irrelevant when the public arrives next Saturday. Nothing would give Taniguchi more satisfaction than a crowd of visitors gazing at the paintings and ignoring the walls.

When the Museum of Modern Art reopens next weekend, its first temporary exhibit will be "Yoshio Taniguchi: Nine Museums," a survey of the architect's austere but meticulously detailed buildings, all of them in Japan. For hours and information, call 212-708-9400, or go to www.moma.org