Last year, the Museum of Modern Art caused a ruckus with a plan to raze its neighbor, the former American Folk Art Museum building, designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. So MoMA
trustees hired the architecture firm Diller Scofidio & Renfro to
explore alternatives to demolition that would still permit expansion.
But
last week, that firm’s architects joined with Glenn D. Lowry, MoMA’s
director, to say that, unfortunately, the building needs to be torn down
after all. They saw no way around it.
What’s left to be said?
Elizabeth
Diller and Ricardo Scofidio seemed genuinely sorrowful about the
outcome. Gifted architects, they brought to the High Line an energy and
vision that recognized obstacles as opportunities, the clash of old and
new as a virtue, when many people favored tearing down those elevated
tracks. Where did that energy and vision go?
A
city presents endless constraints out of which creativity emerges, or
it doesn’t. There were plenty of good reasons to raze the old
Pennsylvania Station 50 years ago, but that didn’t mean that it was
wise. It would be truly radical for MoMA to save the former folk art
building, but that’s not what the museum has ever really been about.
MoMA wants more gallery space, and the expansion that drives the planned
demolition is just more MoMA madness.
MoMA and Diller Scofidio hoped to sweeten the pill by promising improvements
to the museum’s lobby and opening its sculpture garden to the public
free during museum hours. They also propose, in place of the razed
building, a Gray Box for performances, above an Art Bay, with a
retractable glass wall and spaces for yet-to-be-conceived presentations,
visible from the street.
That plan for the former folk museum site sounds a lot like the one Diller Scofidio has proposed for the Culture Shed,
a glossy event and exhibition center without portfolio, cooked up under
the Bloomberg administration to fulfill the “culture” requirements for
Hudson Yards, the West Side commercial development. If you build it,
they will come, is the concept. Across West 53rd Street from MoMA, the
Donnell Library Center, a long-shuttered branch of the New York Public
Library, is scheduled to reopen late next year at the same spot but in
the bowels of a new luxury hotel, at a third of its former size, with
wide bleacher seating and steps as the main feature.
“More
like a cultural space, which is about gathering people, giving people
the opportunity to encounter each other,” is how the library’s
architect, Enrique Norten, describes the plan.
It’s
all the same flimflam: flexible spaces to accommodate to-be-named
programming, the logic of real estate developers hiding behind the
magical thinking of those who claim cultural foresight. It almost never
works.
As
for the opening of MoMA’s Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden,
it’s a nice gesture and possibly transformational, making one of the
city’s treasures available to everyone. That said, the place has always
been a sanctuary, a retreat with a view back onto the city, and who
knows how it will work when it’s opened to the street and entered, as it
rarely is, from the north. I wonder what Philip Johnson, who designed
the garden in the early 1950s, might say. (He died in 2005.) The site
was never intended as a public park.
“Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded” is Yogi Berra’s famous phrase. Let’s hope that’s not the case.
The
neighborhood already has Paley Park, and Central Park isn’t far. But
the fabric of the surrounding streets does need more outliers like the
former American Folk Art Museum building to stem the increasing monotony
of glass towers. MoMA, far from being one of those outliers, has pretty
much become like Extell and other Midtown developers, waiting to gobble
up property and expand its own shiny glass palace. I walked around and
looked at the four-story buildings in the area. How long can they last?
The folk art building is barely a dozen years old. MoMA acquired it in
2011, after the American Folk Art Museum defaulted on its debts and had
to move to smaller quarters near Lincoln Center.
It
was, from MoMA’s perspective, never architecture, just real estate —
business, nothing personal — a parcel of land between the existing
museum building, most recently designed just a decade ago, by the
Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi, and the site of a luxury
condominium tower, designed by Jean Nouvel, the base of which has been
set aside for MoMA galleries. To move smoothly from the galleries in Mr.
Taniguchi’s building to the ones in Mr. Nouvel’s and back again is best
achieved, Ms. Diller insisted last week, by designing a continuous loop
so that people can enter the new rooms at one end and exit at the
other. This demands passageways slicing through the folk art museum
site.
And voilà. “To save the building, we had to lose too much of the building,” is how she regretfully put it.
So there was no choice, Mr. Lowry said. Progress rolls on. Manifest Destiny has its costs.
In
retrospect, Diller Scofidio had an implicit conflict of interest,
taking on the expansion at the same time it swore to leave no stone
unturned when it came to finding alternatives to demolishing the former
folk art building. Accepting the expansion made establishing a
continuous loop the bottom line.
But
the expansion into the condo tower seems the real problem. It is a move
that, aside from vandalizing MoMA’s claim to be a custodian of
architecture and design, adds too little. The 40,000 or so square feet
that the museum will gain, far from ideal, can’t begin to solve the
current overcrowding. Traffic engineers know that adding an extra lane
to a clogged highway only worsens congestion.
The
whole layout and concept of the museum must be reconsidered from
scratch, which goes beyond architecture to the institution’s mind-set.
MoMA is now as jammed and joyless as the Van Wyck Expressway on a Friday
in July. That’s not because it is a victim of its own success; it’s
because the museum is a victim of its own philosophy. This is not just
nostalgia talking.
MoMA’s
leaders seem to have failed to seize a crucial opportunity when they
negotiated for space in return for the sale of the condo site to Hines,
the Houston developer. What were they imagining for MoMA’s expansion
before the folk art site became available? How were the circulation
problems to be solved back then?
Now
it seems clear that they aren’t inclined toward out-of-the-box
alternatives, like off-site places to grow, akin to MoMA PS1, in Long
Island City, Queens. I remember the temporary home the museum occupied
in Queens during its last renovation. It briefly got MoMA out of its
Midtown straitjacket and closer to its pioneering roots.
Wedged
onto a narrow plot, the ill-fated folk art building is far from
perfect. Inside, it’s mostly stairwells and passages, its galleries
tricky to install. But the eccentricity helps to account for what
endears it to architects. Those bespoke, domestic-size spaces, like the
building’s sober hammered bronze facade, share something with the
handicraft of the folk art museum’s collection; the building has a
rootedness, a materiality, an outsize claim to significance. It stands
proudly on the street, the unfashionable antithesis of generic,
open-ended modernism, the opposite of what Diller Scofidio now envisions
in its place, with its paradigm of indefinite and perishable culture.
Might
the new city administration have any excuse or inclination to weigh in
on the demolition and new MoMA plan? Once upon a time, there was talk
about at least saving the facade of the folk art building, a token to
posterity. Ms. Diller dismissed the idea. “Facadism,” she called it.
Fair enough. But Mr. Williams and Ms. Tsien affixed a panel inscribed
with the names of all the workers who helped build the American Folk Art
Museum.
MoMA should save that.
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