A wit in the publicity department of the Museum of Modern Art suggested that the new MoMA was like a favourite golf course to which, to your surprise, nine holes had been added. At a cost of $450 million, the distinguished New York architectural firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) have added 25 per cent more gallery space and created a vehicle for innovation in an institution hitherto surprisingly resistant to change. After two earlier and celebrated architectural makeovers by César Pelli (1984) and Yoshio Taniguchi (2004), the main painting and sculpture galleries looked much the same. The Paris-New York axis still dominated, with sidebar trips to Germany for the Expressionists, Italy for the Futurists and the Netherlands for De Stijl. In both iterations, the recent past was an unauthoritative mélange of ‘what’s up today’... [+]