Not since the Whitney Museum of American Art moved to its new Renzo Piano building last year has a New York museum event been as eagerly awaited as the Metropolitan Museum’s expansion into the Whitney’s former home, the Marcel Breuer–designed fortress on Madison Avenue and Seventy-fifth Street. That the Met would have an entire architecturally significant building in which to explore its growing commitment to modern and contemporary art, at least during the eight years of the present lease, was catnip to the art community. Rumors circulated about the planned opening exhibition, “Unfinished,” although no one was quite sure what the title meant.1 Advance press events served more as appetite-whetters than as sources of solid information. Was the Met planning to become a showcase for trendy art? Reassurance that something far more interesting was envisioned came when “Reimagining Modernism, 1900–1950,” a new, multivalent take on the Met’s twentieth-century collection, was installed in the Fifth Avenue building by Associate Curator Randall Griffey, provocatively combining American and European works in fresh ways. But what was happening to the building?

Finally, in early March, previews of Met Breuer began. For anyone who cares about modernist architecture, it was worth the wait. The lobby now strikes us with its pristine elegance. The celebrated circular lights of the ceiling grid are uniformly white and regular—a luminous, continuous plane across the entire space. The clarity and crispness of that rhythmically punctuated expanse makes us realize, retroactively, how worn the building had