George Lindemann Journa by George Lindemann - "At MoMA, a New Plan to Resolve Old Issues" @wsj By Julie V. Iovine
The proposed plan for an expanded Museum of Modern Art. Diller Scofidio + Renfro
A solution had seemed imminent. Last May, following an outcry over its plan to demolish the American Folk Art Museum, a highly admired architectural gem in the path of its latest expansion scheme along 53rd Street, the Museum of Modern Art announced that it had hired the New York architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro.
There was a huge sigh of relief. These are architects known for tackling the most intractable design problems with creative ingenuity. They were key players in reimagining the abandoned railroad tracks that are now the world-famous High Line Park; they deftly made the sprawling Lincoln Center more hospitable to people and connected to the city; they are art-world familiars, having started their practice with high-concept museum installations more inspired by Marcel Duchamp and the Dada movement than by the Bauhaus or Le Corbusier. Surely if any one could, they would be able to find a way to reconcile the intensely crafted cast-bronze facade of the American Folk Art Museum with the inscrutably sleek glass and steel of MoMA.
Diller Scofidio + Renfro had six months to look at the problem and they valiantly explored every option before coming up blank with a way to save the American Folk Art Museum. Last week, they recommended its demolition. Their expansion proposal includes adding 30% more gallery space, new entrance and lobby treatments for both 53rd and 54th streets, and a public-plaza-cum-performance-art space on the site of the razed folk-art museum. The plan was quickly approved by the MoMA board, and the American Folk Art Museum is to be torn down by June. Just 12 years old, the structure cost $17.4 million to build and was designed by New York architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, contemporaries and friends of the principals at Diller Scofidio + Renfro. At a press conference, Elizabeth Diller described a wrenching visit to the other architects' office to deliver the news personally. In response, Mr. Williams and Ms. Tsien issued their own statement: "This action represents a missed opportunity to find new life and purpose for a building that is meaningful to so many."
You might wonder why we should care if one more quirky little building disappears from the streets of New York. After all, buildings come and go all the time; no one knows this better than architects. But the American Folk Art Museum is a casualty of a different sort, and tearing it down will not usher in the new era of popularity that MoMA seems to be aiming for.
The problem was never simply that the folk-art museum—multistoried and petite at 15,500 square feet—was too idiosyncratic to be annexed (perhaps it could have been made into an executive suite). The problem is that the most recent $425 million MoMA expansion by Yoshio Taniguchi, completed in 2004, failed in many important ways to accommodate the museum's evolving vision of itself as a high-turnover, popular destination. Mr. Taniguchi provided an exquisitely conceptual play on the modernist principles of interlocking geometries and voids when what is now wanted is a trend-savvy cultural venue offering public hang-outs, performance spaces, interactive installations, restaurants and movie theaters, along with the art.
In a statement to museum members last week, MoMA's director, Glenn D. Lowry, described his vision: "Enlivening and participatory, the new MoMA will be a place for people of all ages and experiences to share their thoughts and questions with each other. It is a place for conversation, and a place for many stories." In other words, an Art Land entertainment complex.
The adjacent American Folk Art Museum, which must be demolished to make room for the new design. Giles Ashford
It is hardly surprising that Diller Scofidio + Renfro could not save the American Folk Art Museum while trying to give shape to this new vision and also solve other pressing incongruities left over from earlier additions, not only by Mr. Taniguchi, but also by Cesar Pelli in 1984 and by Philip Johnson in 1964. MoMA's piecemeal but exponential growth has always complicated the museum's determination to be a singular brand in the art world.
Among the most urgently needed fixes, the main entrance on 53rd Street is hard to locate amid several other museum doors—to the bookstore, to the movie theaters, to the chic restaurant and to the private residential Museum Tower confusingly in the middle of them all. Processing visitors through the subway-station-scaled lobby is grim, and the distance to arrive at any art at all is long and can be arduous if it means looking for the escalators, tucked out of sight as an embarrassing necessity. Getting around in general would be easier if crumbs to make a trail were provided along with the audio tours.
The architects' new plan looks like it will resolve these issues. A new canopy over the main entrance on 53rd Street is an easy and welcome fix. Opening up the beloved sculpture garden on 54th Street so that visitors can troop through to another main entrance is a lovely idea that one hopes won't turn the tranquil garden into the congested victim of its own popular success that the High Line has become. There will be 40,000 more square feet of gallery space flowing into three new floors belonging to MoMA but standing within an as-yet-unbuilt 82-story luxury condo immediately west of the site of the American Folk Art Museum. Circulation on the ground floor has been greatly clarified and a section of lobby ceiling raised. But it is hard to muster much excitement about the plan to use lots of transparent glass, the material of choice at hundreds of uninspired Midtown office buildings.
The cleared site of the folk-art museum gets special treatment: A glass box, called the Art Bay, will serve up exhibitions, performances and parties and feature a two-story mechanical wall—a kind of remote-control garage door in glass—that can open the space entirely to the street, as well as an elevating floor. Atop the Art Bay, another glass box is a hybrid gallery-performance space, for a total of more than 15,000 square feet for new activities.
The garage-door, street-party for art is the boldest gesture of the expansion plan. Large-scale moving parts are very big in architecture right now—from the waving brise-soleil at the Milwaukee Art Museum to a room-size elevator-gallery at the front of Sperone Westwater on the Bowery. Diller Scofidio + Renfro itself originally proposed that a movable plaza at Lincoln Center rise up from the underground parking lot and is currently working on a nested building that comes apart into an indoor-outdoor performance space at Hudson Yards. Movable walls are great in warm and grit-free climates—and outdoor installations have been a big summertime success for MoMA at PS1 in Queens—but for a design trick it sounds very expensive (not to mention noisy to operate and a nightmare to maintain) and of limited appeal for anyone other than party-hearty art-installation aficionados.
Lovers of a more intimate approach to experiencing art may cry foul, but clearly MoMA has its finger clamped on the pulse of the zeitgeist and is determined to lead the charge into the future.
So why should we mourn the loss of the delicate little American Folk Art Museum? It is the nature of cities and their institutions to grow and constantly redefine themselves. But one hopes that in the process of reshaping themselves, cities and their institutions will save bits of their best past selves. Here, however, not only will the street and the city be impoverished by the loss of a human-scaled and imaginatively wrought work of architecture. What is more distressing still is that Mr. Williams and Ms. Tsien's American Folk Art Museum building is being sacrificed to a mushrooming monolith—one whose claims to want to embrace diverse experiences of art are contradicted from the start by its plans to destroy a prime example of that very impulse.
Ms. Iovine writes about architecture for the Journal.
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