Modern Museum

The West 54th Street town house of the late John D. Rockefeller is one of the few remaining private residences in mid-Manhattan with a scrap of lawn. Mr. Rockefeller had not seen it for years, however, and last week came news that it and his son's place next door would soon be torn down. The sites had been given to the Museum of Modern Art for a fine new building to be completed in 1938.

Since its founding eight years ago, the Museum of Modern Art has had three homes. First was seven rooms in the Heckscher Building. Next was a converted private house on West 53rd Street, then two weeks ago it moved to temporary quarters in Rockefeller Center. The new building will occupy the site of the West 53rd Street place and use part of the adjacent Rockefeller sites in the rear for a garden. Designed by Architects Philip L. Goodwin & Edward D. Stone, the new museum will be a block of concrete, white marble, dark stone, glass brick and plate glass, the first "functional" museum building in the U. S. Taking advantage of its $1,000,000, block-deep plot, almost the entire ground floor of the new museum will be walled with glass, so that pedestrians on 53rd Street will be able to see temporary exhibitions as in a gigantic showcase. Upper floors will be rearranged with movable screens to suit whatever type of exhibition is on the calendar. Higher up still will be a film library--one of the museum's most important adjuncts--with a discreet projection room that will hold just 50 seats. In the basement will be a lecture room to hold more than 500 people. The Museum's board of trustees, which includes Mrs. Rockefeller, Lord Duveen, Edsel Ford, John Hay Whitney and Marshall Field, will meet in the most public board room any of them has ever seen: a penthouse of clear plate glass. To pay for the building, trustees and other friends of the museum contributed some $750,000.

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