Museum of Arts & Design

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Museum of Arts and Design
Established	1956
Location	2 Columbus Circle New York, NY, USA
Type	Art museum
Director	Holly Hotchner
Curator	David Revere McFadden, Lowery Stokes Sims
Website	http://www.madmuseum.org/

The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), based in Manhattan in New York, New York, is a center for the collection, preservation, study, and display of contemporary hand-made objects in a variety of media, including: clay, glass, metal, fiber, and wood.

It accommodates 300,000 visitors per year, however, touring exhibitions, outreach efforts, and off-site programs effectively double that audience.

Contents 1 History 2 Move to and Controversial Redesign of 2 Columbus Circle 3 See also 4 References 5 External links

[edit] History

The museum was founded in 1956 by philanthropist Aileen Osborn Webb, as the Museum of Contemporary Crafts.

In 1986, it relocated to 40 West 53rd and was renamed the American Craft Museum. In 2002 it changed its name again to the Museum of Arts and Design.

[edit] Move to and Controversial Redesign of 2 Columbus Circle

In 2008, the museum moved to 2 Columbus Circle.

The new location, with more than 54,000 square feet, more than tripled the size of the Museum’s former space. It includes: four floors of exhibition galleries for works by established and emerging artists; a 150-seat auditorium in which the museum plans to feature lectures, films, and performances; and a restaurant. It also includes a Center for the Study of Jewelry, and an Education Center that offers multi-media access to primary source material, hands-on classrooms for students, and three artists-in-residence studios.

However, the museum's plans to radically alter the building's original design by Edward Durell Stone touched off a preservation battle joined by Tom Wolfe, Chuck Close, Frank Stella, Robert A. M. Stern, Columbia art history department chairman Barry Bergdoll, New York Times' architecture critics Herbert Muschamp and Nicolai Ouroussoff, urbanist scholar Witold Rybczynski, among others. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Ada Louise Huxtable, and others, however, supported the redevelopment of a long neglected site. Stone's son Hicks, also an architect, favored preservation and was appalled that "an institution whose central mission is to preserve cultural artifacts is in fact determined to demolish what is probably its most valuable artifact." [1]

Before the building's alterations, Stone's design at 2 Columbus Circle was listed as one of the World Monuments Fund's "100 Most Endangered Sites for 2006."^[1][2] In 2004, the National Trust for Historic Preservation called it one of America's "11 Most Endangered Historic Places."

The museum's new location was developed by Brad Cloepfil and his Portland, Oregon-based firm Allied Works Architecture. The redesigned building replaced the original white Vermont Marble with a glazed terra-cotta and glass facade. Its nacreous ceramic exterior is said to change color at different viewing angles.

Against Cloepfil's wishes, the museum's board and its director, Holly Hotchner, ordered that a band of windows be added to the building's top floor. This added a horizontal strip which connected a pair of vertical bands to create the shape of a letter H. Another vertical band on the western side of the building, reads as an I. Of the addition to the word "HI" to his design, Cloepfil said that "he has never felt more violated in any way." ^[3]

The architecture critic for the LA Times, Christopher Hawthorne, wrote:

It's as if Stone, his architecture muffled and disregarded by Cloepfil, MAD and the city of New York, managed to have the last word on the preservation controversy, popping up from beyond the grave to say hello. The fact that the word in question is unpretentious and loosely informal makes it deliciously Stone-like, and allows it to undermine the severity and cold perfectionism of Cloepfil's exterior all the more.^[4]

Ada Louise Huxtable, who had originally coined the term "Lollipop Building" for the original structure, wrote:

Something has gone noticeably wrong. This is a precisely calibrated aesthetic that can be destroyed by one bad move, and that move has been the late insertion of a picture window on the restaurant floor. The client insisted and the architect resisted, and we will never know when and where the relationship fell apart -- but at some point it obviously did, and so did the design....The eternal banality of the picture window is forever with us...Even with the building's flaws, however, criticism of the structure has been alarmingly out of proportion and flagrantly out of control.^[5]

Paul Goldberger praised the new building's "functional, logical, and pleasant" interior in a review in the New Yorker, but wrote:

Ultimately, Cloepfil has been trapped between paying homage to a legendary building and making something of his own. As a result, if you knew the old building, it is nearly impossible to get it out of your mind when you look at the new one. And, if you’ve never seen Columbus Circle before, you probably won’t be satisfied, either: the building’s proportions and composition seem just as odd and awkward as they ever did. ^[6]

Witold Rybczynski wrote in Slate that the new design:

feels like an alien presence...Slots appear at random, and a continuous ribbon of fritted glass zigzags down the building, graphic effects that belong more to the packaging of consumer products than to architecture. At the base, several of Stone's original Venetian columns are preserved behind murky glass like body parts in formaldehyde. As for the glazed terra-cotta tiles of the exterior, they are dull and lifeless and make even the slick steel-and-glass facade of the Time-Warner Center next door look lively. The new Museum of Arts and Design is artsy and designy, but it is not good architecture, and it makes me miss Stone's winsome palazzo all the more. ^[7]

Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, Justin Davidson, said:

This version won’t satisfy those who thought it should never have been touched, and it’s not bold enough to overpower their arguments—or, I suspect, to turn the Museum of Arts and Design into an essential destination. ^[8]

Architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff named the building as one of seven buildings in New York City that should be torn down because they "have a traumatic effect on the city." ^[9] Ouroussoff also wrote:

The renovation remedies the annoying functional defects that had plagued the building for decades. But this is not the bold architectural statement that might have justified the destruction of an important piece of New York history. Poorly detailed and lacking in confidence, the project is a victory only for people who favor the safe and inoffensive and have always been squeamish about the frictions that give this city its vitality.^[10]

An article in the New York Times acknowledged that when Holly Hotchner first became the director of the institution ten years ago "few people seemed to have heard of it." Today the museum may be best know for "the bitter preservation battle arose over its purchase and planned renovation of 2 Columbus Circle, the 1964 'lollipop' building near Central Park designed by Edward Durell Stone." Ms. Hotchner said she "hopes it will become known for what it does, not where it is."^[11]

[edit] See also

• American craft

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Museum of Arts & Design

• Museum website
• A New Face on Columbus Circle
• Renovation Adds Light to Lollipop Building
• Interactive Video of Transformation
• Missing the Marble at 2 Columbus Circle
• Images
• Essay: Modernism Endangered
• Article by Tom Wolfe
• Force Behing 2 Columbus Circle: Interview with the Director
• Report by NY1 of a rally
• Men's Vogue on Brad Cloepfil
• Recent Past Preservation Network
• The Architect's Newspaper
• Eyesore or Icon?
• 'Second Lives' Exhibit Fall 2008
• The Rape of 2 Columbus Circle

Coordinates: 40°46′3″N 73°58′55″W / 40.7675°N 73.98194°W / 40.7675; -73.98194