The Dia art space opens its doors.

The Manhattan art scene resonates so far off its island home that some of its key institutions have made the physical leap as well. The Guggenheim has international outposts, and both the Queensborough Bridge and 7 train can take museumgoers to the temporary MOMA QNS, set among satellite galleries and Turkish restaurants in Long Island City.

Now the Chelsea-based Dia Art Foundation has expanded its major collection of Minimalism-and-after artists to an impressive, renovated factory on the Hudson River, just over an hour by train from Grand Central Station.

A short walk from the Metro North station at Beacon, Dia:Beacon opened in mid-May as the world's largest contemporary arts museum. Vast central and side galleries and subdivided chambers show Donald Judd's Douglas fir boxes and aluminum wall constructions, Dan Flavin's neon poles, and Joseph Beuys' felt piles topped with copper plates. One hundred and two panels of Warhol's color-coded painting series, Shadows, form an installation the size of most auditoriums, and four of Richard Serra's rolled-steel monoliths fill the former train shed.

Dia:Beacon gives a permanent location to an artistic ethos that's developed since the 60s around concerns for space, light and installation?an art caught up at least as much in its context as it is in its contents. And Dia director Michael Govan found a superb location. Readily accessible to Manhattan while at an appealing remove, Dia:Beacon has a quarter million square feet of exhibition space, much of it lit by north-facing sawtooth skylights that bathe paintings and sculpture in natural light.

Govan, who was Thomas Krens' assistant director at the Guggenheim before taking over Dia in 1994, spotted the building five years ago on a small plane flight up the Hudson. Dia had been jockeying for a major Manhattan expansion; their range changed when Govan first entered the then-derelict factory.

"I walked through this cool, small, dark entrance in the building that's now the cafe, and remember walking in to the open space. And it just really did look brighter on the inside than the outside? I was just amazed; I just didn't know where the light was coming from for that brief moment."

To renovate the huge factory, built in 1929 to print Nabisco's cartons, Govan secured the approval of Dia's artists and enthusiastic backing from Louise and Leonard Riggio (Dia's chairman, who founded Barnes & Noble) and trustees including Mimi Haas (heir to the Levi's fortune). International Paper donated the building; $30 million later it's on the National Register of Historic Places, and is open to the public.

The museum's veneer, spare and pristine, was designed by artist Robert Irwin and the architectural firm OpenOffice, with Irwin's forecourt and garden profuse with grids of hawthorns, crabapples and lavender. The building's immense basement has huge screens of Bruce Nauman's overnight studio video-map, while the attic houses Louise Bourgeois' nightmare forms sculpted from polished stone and regurgitative materials (a giant spider lurks over one of her evocative cells).

Though Bourgeois is about as distinct from Dia's thought-driven ethos as an artist could be, her presence helps spring a basic surprise?who would've supposed Minimalism's dour power could feel playful? But kids' exuberance at Dia:Beacon is unmistakable, and the rest of us get giddy thrills passing through the constricting interiors of Serra's looming Torqued Ellipses. A massive stone, installed in a wall by Michael Heizer, looks like it's been crammed in a closet, a fold-up ironing board that might not stay put. Corners are at once outlets to clean, open spaces, and an introduction into a new personal obsession, if not an artistic mania.

Robert Ryman's white paintings, subtle, ever-varied, and as spiritual as you dare, are also as radical a distinction between art and its space as either can bear. Paintings look superb under Dia's skylights, which spurs a subtle frisson, for Dia's painters pursue a daunting critique of that medium's means. Blinkey Palermo's colorful semaphores read backwards and forwards in their gallery, while On Kawara's Today Series are bright black date plaques, interchangeable while declaring their origins in wildly separate places and times.

Hanne Darboven may take the cake for her installation's controlled frenzy: three years' worth of matted, framed cultural sleuthing, from postcards to magazine pages. Stacked from floor to ceiling in several galleries, the installation is less evident as a comment on its era than as a slice of a driven life.

This holds true for Dia artists as a whole, an iconoclastic group bent on durability. Dia:Beacon dwarfs its parent Dia:Chelsea, but the works on view here are dwarfed themselves by land and installation art conceived by artists Dia supports. Michael Heizer has emptied four 20-foot wells into the deep corner of the building, set off by a low glass wall, an ultimate act of letting the space speak for itself. But for a couple of decades, Heizer's been two hours from the nearest paved road in Nevada, constructing his tremendous City with earthmovers, inspired by Mayan temple cities in the Yucatan.

Heizer is but one of Dia's well-funded dreamer/doers. Robert Smithson, represented by piles of glass and gravel, built one of the enduring icons of 70s land art, coiling his Spiral Jetty out into the Great Salt Lake (recently donated to Dia by Smithson's estate). Walter de Maria, whose stainless rings and rims lie flush to oak flooring at Dia:Beacon, built a two-square-mile grid of fine steel poles in New Mexico, his Lightning Field bringing the overnight visitor in closer contact with atmosphere as transient milieu.

Everybody chooses favorites among the two dozen artists in the new museum and finds clunkers to eschew. Getting to Bernd & Hilla Becher's photos of industrial sites and implements at the end of my visit meant saving the best for last, while Fred Sandback's yarn delineations seemed lost in their space, and Imi Knoebel's room of stacked stretchers and furniture parts looked neglected and neglectable.

The delicious draw at Dia:Beacon is the museum itself, the blend of its rarefied contents and the opportunity of the excursion?not any glamorous architectural statement. Critic and curatorial expert Carolee Thea wrote, in a piece on the Guggenheim in Bilbao, that "perhaps the architecture and not the art will bring international visitors here."

At Dia:Beacon, what you see is what you get, and that's especially important insofar as Dia artists offer instances to see more, to see better. Director Govan calculates that about 80 percent of Dia's holdings are now on display, with "roughly 75 percent of that permanent in terms of works, or permanent in terms of artist spaces," adding that "the collection since 1998 has virtually doubled in artists and in works."

The town of Beacon itself is rapidly becoming a test case for what critic Thea terms the "futurist scenarios for cities hoping to solve the problems of decaying economies and unemployment." Waterfront construction continues on a ferry dock, and David Ross (former director at the Whitney and San Francisco's MOMA) heads the Beacon Cultural Project, with big Manhattan galleries such as Sonnabend getting involved.

The Metro North excursion (under $30 with museum admission), past West Point's Babylonian mass, with low wooded mountains across the Hudson and vintage sailboats and kayaks out on the water, makes for an impressive ride up to Dia:Beacon. It's also a relaxing return home, digesting a museum as concentrated as it is huge, an exacting urban meditation that's not quite in the city, not quite exposed in the great outdoors.