Free Form (1)

The 6,000-square-foot gallery that sits atop the new building is no larger than the main gallery space at the museum's former Carnegie Avenue home, but it certainly feels bigger.

There are no columns to get in the way and the building's cobalt blue walls, which merge with the ceiling high above the gallery floor, wrap around everything like a sky.

"People often say that the ideal space that contemporary art wants to live in is a white box," says MOCA chief curator David Norr. "We don't have that."

Instead there are diagonal windows that let light in (or shut it out when called for) and an open floor plan that gives curators ultimate flexibility when planning exhibitions. If it can fit in the freight elevator, it'll work in the gallery.

"It was important to have [the gallery] be a very simple rectangle so we weren't fighting with the angles of the walls," explains MOCA executive director Jill Snyder. "You'll notice that the more angularity of the building is on the lower level. When you get to the top floor, it's the most regular rectangular form. But that's because it's going to have the highest degree of change."

The space doesn't need to be much bigger than 6,000 square feet, Snyder explains, because that's the industry norm when programming a show that could travel to another contemporary art museum after its close at MOCA.

And because the gallery's interior walls can be taken apart and reassembled in seemingly limitless configurations, the space is essentially a blank canvas.

"From a curator's perspective, it's a dream," Norr says. "It allows us to stretch the possibility of our presentations."

Screen Time

Near the back of this floor, you'll find the Cohen Family Gallery for film and video. When the museum opens, there will be a suite of contemporary video artworks on view, but film nights are also in the works that will feature mid- and full-length 16 mm films by emerging and established artists.

View Master

Museums don't make art, they make exhibitions. And the new building's design lets guests in on that normally unseen process.

If visiting between shows, you can climb to the top of an observation platform that looks out over the fourth-floor gallery and get a glimpse of the next show being installed.

"We wanted to immerse people in not only the process of engaging with art, but also the process of making exhibitions," says architect Farshid Moussavi. "We would probably love to peep to the backstage of a theater, and it is very much that kind of approach."

If you want a different kind of view, check out the fourth-floor's Cahoon Lounge, which offers a look through the museum's glass curtain wall down Euclid Avenue toward the apartments, shops and restaurants that are part of the Uptown development.

FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS

MOCA is known for its popular exhibition opening parties, but the museum will also be throwing a bash the first Friday of every month. "The events will have a cultural component," says director of programs and associate curator Megan Lykins Reich. "It's not necessarily going to be a contemporary art focus." They'll target the creative crowd with themes such as Eat/Drink, Style/Design and Now Trending. The inaugural First Friday party, on Nov. 2, finds Marigold Catering creating food inspired by MOCA's architecture and the building's themes of transparency, dimension and revelation.