New York City
Bentel & Bentel, Architects

Bentel & Bentel’s sleek and luminous café, bar, and restaurant, The Modern, infuses the Museum of Modern Art with a savory essence

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	Photo © Eduard Heuber / Archphoto
	Left to right: Susan Nagle, ASID; Peter Bentel, AIA; Carol Bentel, FAIA; Dr. Paul Bentel, FAIA
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For years, New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has been famous for everything but its food. Even after Sette Mezzo took over its restaurant operations, as Sette MoMA, in 1993, the cuisine and the setting verged on the overly quiet. Now with The Modern, operated by acclaimed restaurateur Danny Meyer and designed by architects Bentel & Bentel, MoMA has a real chance at competing with its high-end Midtown Manhattan neighbors.

As you enter The Modern, on the ground floor of the restored 1939 building by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, a bar and café shimmer softly before you in a space originally occupied by a gallery. Here, gleaming wall and ceiling surfaces create a miragelike setting for the bar-and-café area’s panoramic end wall, a refulgent photographic mural of a jungly garden. The mural, The Clearing (2003), by German artist Thomas Demand, is a life-size depiction of fake leaves made of paper—but never mind. It rivets your attention, almost making you forget that your view of the real thing—the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden—is blocked by a frosted-glass wall. True, the wall is translucent, but you have to be on the other side, in The Modern’s fine-dining area, to enjoy the famous museum garden with its vines, trees, and sculptures.

Creating an ambitious venue that could offer a choice of casual or formal dining experiences within a tight museum space posed more than a culinary challenge: For starters, Meyer needed a smoothly functioning, soigné restaurant for a clientele who might have a taste for Modernism, but prefer it served with varied and pungent flair (like Meyer’s cuisine). MoMA’s director, Glenn Lowry, and its chief curator of architecture and design, Terence Riley, wanted to make sure the restaurant would keep the purity and clarity of the Goodwin-Stone architecture, while blending with the recent expansion and renovation by Yoshio Taniguchi with Kohn Pedersen Fox [RECORD, January 2005, page 94].

Bentel & Bentel won over the museum officials with a design that deftly combines frosted and tinted glass planes, changing ceiling heights, and a range of floor textures (including black terrazzo, white oak, and dark carpet) to differentiate the various programmatic areas of the 14,400-square-foot restaurant. Against the stringently planar rectilinearity of these elements, the architects introduced such streamlined counterpoints as sinuously curved, frosted-glass walls and a gently arcing marble bar, which refer adroitly to the Goodwin-Stone restored canopy and lobby counter and Taniguchi’s fritted glass. Besides the 112-seat space for fine dining, 110-seat café, and 18-seat bar, the brief called for two kitchens and a private dining room in the 1964 Philip Johnson–designed annex next door.

Want the full story? Read the entire article in our September 2005 issue.
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