The Museum of Modern Art unveiled on Wednesday a sweeping redesign of its Midtown building, featuring a retractable glass wall, new gallery space and the opening of its entire first floor, including the beloved sculpture garden, free to the public.
It is unclear whether this grand, ambitious plan will be enough to quell protests over a long-contemplated and controversial part of the museum’s overhaul: the razing of its next-door neighbor on West 53rd Street, the noteworthy, if idiosyncratic, former home of the American Folk Art Museum.
MoMA announced in April that it planned to demolish the folk museum, despite the building’s well-regarded designers and its striking bronze facade. After protests from architects, urban planners and preservationists, MoMA officials said they would review that decision.
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But museum officials said on Wednesday that keeping the folk museum, built in 2001 and bought by MoMA in 2011, was simply impossible, and they focused on the benefits of the new design that came about during the review.
“It’s a very nice gesture of a kind of new ethos: To make publicly accessible, unticketed space that is attractive and has cultural programming,” Glenn D. Lowry, MoMA’s director, said.
The architects of the folk museum, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, protested the most recent decision in a statement.
“This action represents a missed opportunity to find new life and purpose for a building that is meaningful to so many,” the architects said. “The inability to experience the building firsthand and to appreciate its meaning from an historical perspective will be profoundly felt.”
MoMA plans to start construction this spring or summer and to finish the project in 2018 or 2019. Despite the plan’s broad scope, the museum said it could not yet provide a budget, making the viability of the redesign hard to measure.
MoMA officials said they would need to raise all the money privately because the museum is not a city-owned institution. “This is now a much bigger project than we had envisioned,” Mr. Lowry said. “We have to figure out how to cost it out.”
The overhaul seeks to address some of the criticisms leveled at the museum since its $858 million overhaul by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi just nine years ago. Common complaints are that the 2004 redesign appears cold and closed off to the general public; its lobby is chaotic and overcrowded; and it takes too long to reach the art.
Diller Scofidio & Renfro, the architectural firm hired by MoMA to evaluate whether the shoebox-shaped, 40-foot-wide folk art building could be incorporated into a renovation, said the decision was arrived at after intensive study. The broad plan was presented to some members of the media on Tuesday and Wednesday.
“It’s not for lack of trying that we find ourselves at the same pass,” said Elizabeth Diller, a principal at the firm. “We can’t find a way to save the building.”
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/09/arts/design/a-grand-redesign-of-moma-does-not-spare-a-notable-neighbor.html?hp&_r=0
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