For this small coup de theatre, we must thank the Los Angeles-based architect Michael Maltzan, of whom MoMA’s director, Glenn Lowry, says, “He gave us more architecture than we had any right to expect”. Maltzan, one of the safer of LA’s architectural wild bunch, was brought in add a bit of pizzazz to the MoMA’s conservatively-inclined masterplanning architects, Cooper Robertson. And indeed, Maltzan has done his level best to make a silk purse out of this particular sow’s ear. The building is just a great big low, dull box. It used to be covered in blue cladding: now it is covered in very secure cladding of a more intense blue. This slight colour shift is the only thing, apart from the “MoMA” acronym painted in trompe l’oeuil effect on the rooftop plantrooms and inscribed across the entrance, to signal that the building contains objects more valuable than DVD players.

Maltzan has done a mild deconstruction job in the interior at the front of the building. You get ramps and sharp angles and a mezzanine shop/café and a mysterious volume hanging in space, sundry projected images and one useless wedge of leftover floor where you find yourself trapped by railings. He has tried, in his word, to “delaminate” the usual barrier between public lobby and hermetically-sealed galleries, hence that teasing glimpse of the Demoiselles. It’s OK - it certainly feels like an event - though you find yourself wondering what one of the original deconstructionists like Zaha Hadid or Daniel Libeskind or America’s Peter Eisenman would have made of it.