Terence Riley on His Years as MoMA's Design Guru

Terence Riley never got to move into his new MoMA office. When he left the museum on March 15 to become director of the Miami Art Museum—where he’ll oversee the construction of a brand-new $200 million building—his Department of Architecture and Design was still in temporary space. But Riley could look down on the minimalist monument he’d helped build and think that when it came to rehabilitating modernism’s reputation, his work here was done. Hard as it may be to believe now, when Riley was hired as architecture curator in 1992, at age 37, people didn’t have Mies Barcelona chairs in their glass-walled high-rise apartments. He’s arguably overseen the development of an aesthetic cliché: the triumph of his taste in an age of mass-market design connoisseurship.