New York's Museum of Modern Art is back in business: svelte and shiny, writes Jonathan Glancey, compared with our brooding, industrial Tate

I 'm just not sure. Will the gleaming new Museum of Modern Art in the heart of Manhattan continue to look and feel as messianically clean and glossy as it did in the days leading up to its turbo-hyped opening? I think of Tate Modern back across the Atlantic and up along the Thames. On a good day, for the Tate, the former power station is often packed to the gunwales with visitors. It has the feel of some grandly cinematic airport departure lounge crossed with a brutalist concrete shopping mall the week before Christmas, with a dark dash of Piranesi's 18th-century prison engravings added to the battering mix. I am sure this is great: culture for all. Pile it high, pack 'em in. Everyone loves a winner.

The new-look MoMA is, from an architectural point of view, the polar opposite of Tate Modern. Where the titanic Tate is, at core, a dark and brooding industrial brick, steel and concrete colossus, MoMA is supercool and shiny, like some svelte downtown office block, rich with the art hanging from its sheer white walls, dangling from soaring atriums and lining minimalist lobby after minimalist lobby. Similar to a supremely self-confident corporate headquarters, it seems the stuff of hushed corridors, sleek executives, silent escalators and purposeful, lucrative activity. All that green slate from Vermont and black Zimbabwean granite, those forests of oak floors, the mesmerising vistas of stairs crossing stairs oh so high in what becomes, as the eye loses focus, almost pure architectural ether.

In truth, MoMA will be as packed with visitors as Tate Mod- ern, perhaps even more so, each paying $20 for the privilege. This is, in every way, an expensive and yet discreetly ambitious piece of architecture. Twice as big as Tate Modern and occupy- ing a large chunk of the city block between West 53rd and 54th Streets, it is effectively a brand-new building. Involving extensive gutting and demolition, the overhaul has cost more than $800m.

The architect is Yoshio Taniguchi (born in 1937), a discreet, Tokyo-based perfectionist who has worked with painstaking and diplomatic care to translate meticulous Japanese attention to architectural detail to an altogether rougher and readier New York construction site. When Taniguchi's winning design for the museum was announced in 1997, some commentators called for a more dramatic building, something along the lines of, say, Frank Gehry's bombastic Bilbao Guggenheim. After all, it was at MoMA in 1932, three years after it was founded by Alfred H Barr, that the architect Philip Johnson and historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock mounted a show of international modern architecture that truly revolutionised building design in the US.

Taniguchi's MoMA is as revolutionary as a top-of-the-range Lexus sedan. But certainly not bad for that. New York already has theatrical museums and galleries: Frank Lloyd Wright's sensational Guggenheim on Fifth Avenue; the Metropolitan's gloriously pompous classical temple to the muses several blocks south; and the fairytale-like Cloisters museum at the northern tip of Manhattan. Perhaps MoMA's director, Glenn Lowry, has made a rather smart move in making his museum in Manhattan's central business district all discretion on the out- side yet filled with a vast collection of eye-popping and medi-tative art, along with industrial design, architecture, photography, graphics, shops and that much-loved sculpture garden (now greatly enlarged) for lunch and tea. Indeed, this contrast remains one of the joys of MoMA - imagine finding a public place such as this through a door in a wall in London's Oxford Street.

The new MoMA galleries are well scaled, not too bright and clutter-free. There are none of those knitted red ropes that loop from brass stand to brass stand through all too many galleries, nor (as far as I could see) those patronising wall panels explaining everything you look at to the point where you would prefer to stare out of the museum's big windows and watch the city go by. Above all, there are lots and lots of things to see, from an XK-E Jaguar and a Bell helicopter to encyclopaedic examples of virtually every momentous modern artist and artwork you can think of, starting with Picasso and Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

MoMA remains, at heart, a kind of well-meaning school. It still teaches a chronological and fairly thorough course on modern art, architecture and design to anyone with sufficient endurance to work their way conscientiously through six vast floors of generously displayed objects. There are something like 100,000 items in total, though they are not all on display at the same time. Even the gifts are educational. Where else would you find goods on sale designed by Alvar Aalto, Charles and Ray Eames, Philippe Starck and Frank Lloyd Wright?

The permanent collection here is as magnificent as it is com- prehensive. If it lacks a sense of forward energy, the building perhaps reflects this. Taniguchi's design is smooth, uncontroversial, well ordered and methodical. MoMA is not at the leading edge of art, architecture and design as it was in the 1930s; it has matured. Yet no matter how successful it will be in terms of numbers, and no matter how noisy its notionally calm galleries become, it will have more than a whiff of a particularly generous corporate display.

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