Yesterday, DS+R announced in their proposal for MoMA's redesign that the American Folk Art Museum would have to be demolished. Backlash from the #folkMoMA community quickly arose: architects and critics called the choice callous and unsustainable, outraged not only by the Folk Art Museum's destruction but also the design that would take its place, and its impact on New York's (and DS+R's) reputation.
We've gathered a slew of responses to the proposal, both indignant and accepting, from Archinect contributors and beyond, and will be following developments closely. Here are a few of those thoughts:
From the Archinect news post, American Folk Art Museum will be razed in Diller Scofidio + Renfro's MoMA expansion:
Donna Sink: "All of DSR's previous work is tarnished by this."
Darkman: "This solidifies Rem Koolhaas as the best architect-thinker of our time, for his original MoMA proposal, "MoMA, Inc." "
thebeigecity: "As for the Folk Art Museum - it was cramped and cloying, overly sentimental and specialized. Yes, the new addition is boring but its by DS+R so there will be some LED lights or video screens or transgressive performance space or single surfaces or bad formalism or some other techy knick knacks tacked on - don't worry, it will all be ok and nothing more."
jla-x: "The grime was NY. It was its character. The folk art building had some of that brutalness that was fitting. The dsr project is sterile. Generally speaking, Ny is a sad sterile shell of what it once was. Its a plastic surgery victim that removed her charming idiosyncratic features to achieve some phony image of perfection and ended up losing her unique beauty and looking like all the other plastic people."
Other news publications:
Jerry Saltz for Vulture: "Somewhere inside me, I heard myself saying my good-byes to MoMA. I thought, I have seen the best modern museum of my generation destroyed by madness... From the days both the new MoMA and the American Folk Art Museum opened, it was clear to almost all in the art world that they were tragic failures in terms of their primary missions. Now those disasters are joined forever."
Justin Davidson for Vulture: "But that hesitancy shows in the provisional design for the next phase. The client is bent on art-world domination; the architects seem halfhearted. Instead of healing the scar left by the Folk Art Museum, they have left a gleaming gap."
John Hill for Archidose: "Ultimately the Williams Tsien design was too small and inflexible (like I said, not a surprising move) to work for MoMA, regardless of Diller's specious words about integrity. As sustainability and the need to preserve buildings increases, so does the need to be creative about how buildings are reused. In this case the creativity is nowhere to be seen."
Statement from the Folk Art Museum's architects, Williams and Tsien, via the architects' website: "We have learned of MoMA’s final decision to raze the former American Folk Art Museum building and replace it with a new structure. This action represents a missed opportunity to find new life and purpose for a building that is meaningful to so many.
The Folk Art building was designed to respond to the fabric of the neighborhood and create a building that felt both appropriate and yet also extraordinary. Demolishing this human‐scaled, uniquely crafted building is a loss to the city of New York in terms of respecting the size, diversity and texture of buildings in a midtown neighborhood that is at risk of becoming increasingly homogenized.
This is a building that we and others teach from and about. It has served as an invaluable learning resource for students, colleagues and scholars, and a source of inspiration for many more. It has a powerful architectural legacy. The inability to experience the building firsthand and to appreciate its meaning from an historical perspective will be profoundly felt.
As architects, we must be optimists. So we look to the future and we move on."
Paul Goldberger for Vanity Fair: "So why not let the matter go? Not every preservation battle is won, and the museum and its architects have produced a long list of rational reasons why they don’t feel that saving this particular building is practical. But as art isn’t always a rational matter, sometimes architecture isn’t, either. The brooding, somber façade of the folk-art museum, made of folded planes of hammered bronze, combines monumental dignity with the image of delicate handcrafting, and it is a majestic, if physically small, architectural achievement. A city that allows such a work to disappear after barely a dozen years is a city with a flawed architectural heart. A large cultural institution that cannot find a suitable use for such a building is an institution with a flawed architectural imagination.
The Williams and Tsien building is also the last remnant of something approaching reasonable scale on West 53rd Street, a block that seems ever bigger, ever more corporate, ever less diverse. Tearing down the folk-art museum may make sense by MoMA’s measure of things, but it is hard to see how it makes New York a better place. "
Robin Pogrebin for the New York TImes:
"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.”
Via Twitter:
Alexandra Lange (architecture and design critic) @LangeAlexandra: "I thought museums had woken up from the bigger-and-bigger dream. Not in NYC."
AlJavieera Tropics (geographer and adjunct professor) @AlJavieera: "MoMA needs to demolish a building to create seamless entry for luxury condo tower into the museum."
Mimi Zeiger (journalist and critic) @loudpaper: "MoMA will survive the #FolkMoma fiasco, but will DS+R?"
Christopher Hawthorne (architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times) @HawthorneLAT: "This should be good: shortlist for new Vancouver Art Gallery includes both antagonists in #FolkMoMA fight: DS+R and Williams/Tsien."
Karrie Jacobs (writer) @KarrieUrbanist: "Forget it, Jake. It's real estate."
Michael Kimmelman (architecture critic for the New York Times) @kimmelman: "If MoMA had treated Folk as architecturally worthy, like objects in its collection, the question of demolition couldn't have arisen."
61 Comments
They destroyed a beautiful object. Watch what happened next.
Let MoMa display some of the more important architectural elements of the FAM in their new space. Curators can develop exhibits around the great lost architecture of modernism and beyond. This lost will work will be in the permanent collection. Others, such as Sullivan's Stock Exchange Arch and Neutra's Gettysburg Cyclorama will be can be displayed periodically. Newer buildings that were once deemed significant but have now lost their appeal,( I am talking to you, Portlandia) will offer a continual changing exhibit. There will be posters for you to purchase. Problem solved.
I like vado's idea, but would propose taking it one step further. I think MoMA should disassemble the FAM and reassemble it +/-25' away within the the new MoMA addition. It could be included as part of an exhibit on "Great Modern Architecture of the Early 21st Century." Inside, MoMA could program installations, lectures, and performance art. If MoMA is not interested in this proposal, I may also pitch this idea to the Museum of Postmodern Architecture (MoPA). I know they are looking for a new location and are considering a Portlandia location.
that is the appropriate way to display lost architecture.
Even if the Moma doesn't takes the facade panels, my guess is they'll fetch a pretty penny and end up in some Soho loft. They truly are beautiful. The Moma should reconsider renaming themselves the Museum of Modernist Art, cause that's what it is.
I love Donna almost more than life itself -- but I'm having trouble with the idea that a vaporization would be better than a retention of the facade, either in situ or relocated. Could it be that MoMA doesn't want a permanent reminder of what it destroyed ? History is replete with retention of historic fabric, for sentimental and aesthetic reasons, to say nothing of borrowed nobility, and the conservation of energy and material ? Modern-day European practice affords many inspiring examples . . .
We shouldn't let the unfortunate experience at New Haven -- allowing a mediocrity to abut the A+A building -- bias us against all new/vs./old conjunctions !
The only plausible use for the facade? Stick it in the new sculpture garden, and make it a climbing wall.
OK, a climbing wall in the garden is a brilliant idea. Love it, beta. I could get behind that.
I know some very good artists - Type A - who made some custom climbing wall grips. If MOMA used those, hell, I'd contribute a hundred bucks to getting the project made! I still wouldn't visit the Museum therefore ever see the climbing wall, but I'd happily contribute to some art that isn't hanging on a Clean White Wall.
No, Quondam, I can't articulate it sufficiently, not sufficiently for you, certainly. Call it using black humor to deal with grief. A climbing wall will never happen. But my fear is that using the panels in some other way will just be employing the maudlin pseudo-respect commonly seen in memorial design these days.
There is a church facade that was saved around NYU for some odd reason, whereas the building itself was demolished to build a bland apartment condo tower behind. It is the ultimate insult: a taxidermy animal head displayed on the wall. I can see why Diller wasn't interested in saving the facade--its a complete disrespect to the building and architects.
Climbing wall aside (that would be the ultimate disrespect to the FAM), it seems like it would fit into the context of downtown brooklyn better, if there is a way to disassemble and remake the building. Then the FAM could move there... or better yet, I could make it into my house (ha).
2BR02B
Actually it is fitting in a way- The old and, peaceful, knowledgeable being replaced by the young, aggressive, and void.
Perhaps this new design could be improved yet. - A building with a single volume, and everyone wears google glass. the password to the WIFI is 'avant-garde'.
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