It has become a cliché and something of a crisis that art museums, along with a few commercial galleries, now believe they need to go big or go home, vying for our divided attention. The Modern has spent $450 million during the current makeover to add another 47,000 square feet of gallery space. Its goal is to show more of the vast collection but also partly to ease congestion by dispersing visitors around a bigger campus. Attendance, which was a million visitors per year during the 1970s, topped two million after Taniguchi, and reached three million by 2010, holding pretty much steady ever since. Mr. Taniguchi’s expansion squandered oodles of square footage on a dubious second-floor atrium, funneling visitors along narrow, aerial passageways and escalators that filled up like the 6 Train at rush hour.

Expansions tend to bring larger crowds. Transportation experts call the phenomenon induced demand: The more lanes you add to a traffic-jammed highway, the more cars will inevitably arrive to fill them.

Now comes the Modern’s westward push, which opens to the public on Oct. 21. We got a hint of its aesthetic when the architects unveiled their redo of the Goodwin-Stone interior a couple of years ago, repurposing upstairs galleries for temporary exhibitions, elegantly reconstructing the original Bauhaus staircase with steps that seemed to float on paper-thin sheets of steel and carving a lounge out of the new garden-facing lobby, filling it with Charlotte Perriand sofas and Grand Antique marble. It was all beautifully detailed and bolder than Mr. Taniguchi’s palette, if not much warmer.