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?

Buildings around the Museum of Modern Art, shown in 1939, have fallen to accommodate expansion, changing the scale of West 53rd Street.
Buildings around the Museum of Modern Art, shown in 1939, have fallen to accommodate expansion, changing the scale of West 53rd Street. © Andreas Feininger/Museum of Modern Art

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.


On Jan 14, 2014, at 1:39 PM, Architexturez wrote:

Glenn Lowry, the director of the MoMA, confirmed that the American Folk Art Museum, designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien Architects, will be demolished in order to make way for a re-design and expansion spearheaded by Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R).


ref:  http://www.vulture.com/2014/01/saltz-the-new-moma-expansion-is-a-mess.html
ref:  http://www.vulture.com/2014/01/moma-expansion-plans-american-folk-art-museum.html
ref: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2014/01/american-folk-art-museum-demolition

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An Open Letter to the Museum of Modern Art
source: http://archleague.org/2013/04/an-open-letter-to-the-museum-of-modern-art/