Martino Stierli, a Swiss art history professor, has been appointed chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, Glenn D. Lowry, the museum’s director announced Tuesday.

Mr. Stierli, who will start next March, succeeds Barry Bergdoll, who stepped down last year to teach art history at Columbia University and remains a part-time curator at MoMA. — artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com

If you're on the hunt for some Fourth of July plans, the Museum of Modern Art in New York will celebrate the opening of its "Conceptions of Space: Recent Acquisitions in Contemporary Architecture" exhibition tomorrow. Featuring recently acquired projects from international and emerging architects and artists, the exhibition highlights the evolving role of space through the context of architecture as an art form, and how it serves as a response to broader cultural issues. — bustler.net

[...] MoMA has said it would detach and preserve the facade’s 63 textured copper-bronze panels.

One might suppose that salvage is preferable to annihilation, but before we get too comfortable with such piecemeal preservation, it is worth noting that the panel-by-panel disassembly and storage of an architectural treasure’s metal facade has been tried before in New York City, with comically disastrous results.

Who around here remembers the Laing Stores? — nytimes.com

The Museum of Modern Art’s controversial decision to demolish a neighbor, the former American Folk Art Museum, is about to become reality.

On Monday, scaffolding and protective netting will begin to go up around the folk art building, at 45 West 53rd Street, the museum confirmed on Friday. [...]

The building’s facade will be removed first, panel by panel, and taken to storage. Its future remains uncertain. Demolition is expected to continue through the summer. — nytimes.com

Contrary to what you may have read lately, the Museum of Modern Art is intent on carefully preserving the former American Folk Art Museum next door.

At least, the part of it that is most recognizable to the public: an 82-foot-high sculptural ensemble of 63 panels, cast in a gorgeous copper-bronze alloy [...]

“We will take the facade down, piece by piece, and we will store it,” Glenn D. Lowry, the director of the Museum of Modern Art, said in an interview last week. — nytimes.com

"I think that the press has been too fast to reduce the conversation to heroes and villains and martyrs, and to suggest that what MoMA is doing is necessarily bad. We want to get more information out. We want to share the problem with others and invite them to really take a hard look" - Elizabeth Diller — LA Times

[Diller] had great respect for the Folk Art Museum, calling it a “bespoke” design tailored to the needs of the museum. She went through several scenarios on how to integrate the museum in the expanded footprint. [...]

Adapting the Folk Art Museum building, however, would basically compromise the building’s interior beyond recognition. [...]

The architects would have had to destroy the Folk Art Museum building in order to save it. — Architect Magazing

Young Frank sees creative possibilities everywhere, and likes to use anything he can get his hands on—macaroni, old boxes, spoons, and sometimes even his dog, Eddie—to create things like chairs out of toilet paper rolls and twisting skyscrapers made up of his grandfather’s books. But Old Frank is skeptical; he doesn’t think that’s how REAL architects make things. — Inside/Out

When MoMA’s chief curator of architecture and design Barry Bergdoll gives up his post at the end of the summer and returns to his tenured lair at Columbia University, the museum will lose a quiet crusader. MoMA can feel corporate and aloof, but in his domain, Bergdoll has displayed an uncanny sense of timing, using each exhibition to set a real-world agenda that frequently outlasts its run. — vulture.com