Last week the Museum of Modern Art confirmed plans -- as it expands to the west along 53rd Street in Manhattan -- to demolish the former home of the American Folk Art Museum, a much-praised 13-year old building by New York architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien.
MoMA and its director, Glenn D. Lowry, have since been roundly criticized in the press. So has the architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, which both helped MoMA evaluate the fate of the Folk Art building and is designing the expansion.
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What about the notion that you have a conflict of interest here? That you acted as judge and executioner in helping MoMA weigh the future of the Folk Art building and also proposed the replacement for it?
I just can’t see it that way. When we stepped into this, we stepped into harm’s way, in a sense, to take this on. And we only agreed to take the commission if we were able to really work hard on this question [of the Folk Art building’s fate] and figure out what was possible. MoMA gave us their word that if we had come to a decision to save the building and renovate -- even if it were more expensive -- they would accept our decision. That was the pact, basically, for our involvement. We weren’t hired just to do one discrete thing, to make a judgment about what to do with the Folk Art building. We were hired to help MoMA with an expansion. And when we opened it up to a bigger scope, looking at how to make the museum work better, the project became much more complex, quite frankly. So I don’t know how to answer that question. We tried very hard to make it work, to use the [Folk Art] space, to make the circulation work, to make the logistics work. And when that became so difficult -- when it passed the threshold of losing its identity -- we proposed a different approach.
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