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

"These products suggest the terrific span of Le Corbusier’s career in time, space, and scale, attacking the problems of how we should build and how we should live at home and abroad . . . If current architects take anything from the exhibition—a must-see, despite some critical flaws—it should be the power of those big, gestural drawings, where visual and verbal argument vividly come together." — The New Yorker

It’s a relief on the block, representing the diversity vital to healthy streets — not a perfect building, not even its architects’ best work. But its unembarrassed, luxuriant materiality, its small scale and vulnerability, all qualities that the Modern now seems to reject, belong no less than the glass tower to the messy story of Modernism and city life. — nytimes.com

AFTER impassioned protests from prominent architects, preservationists and design critics, the Museum of Modern Art said on Thursday that it would reconsider its decision to demolish its next-door neighbor, the former home of the American Folk Art Museum, to make room for an expansion. — nytimes.com

The Modernism worth pursuing — worth protecting — is the one where Gregor Samsa wakes up transformed into a large insect, and ends up with an apple embedded in his carapace, which is exactly what the Folk Art Museum is to the Museum of Modern Art, right now, right where it is. — Places Journal

MoMA’s plan can hardly be a surprise, because its entire history since 1937 is based on demolishing potential landmarks. — nytimes.com

Barry Bergdoll, chief curator of MoMA's architecture and design department, told AN that the decision was an administrative, rather than a curatorial one. He called the decision “painful” for architects and others who appreciate Williams and Tsein’s work, and acknowledged that museums have a responsibility to the art in their care—including architecture. — archpaper.com

In an effort to foster the creative debate on urban recovery after Hurricane Sandy, MoMA PS1 and MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design are calling out for ideas to create a sustainable waterfront.

Artists, architects, designers, and others are welcome to present ideas for alternative housing models, creation of social spaces, urban interventions, new uses of public space, the rebuilding of the boardwalk, protection of the shoreline, and actions to engage local communities. — momaps1.org

[FLW's] entire archive is moving permanently to New York in an unusual joint partnership between the Museum of Modern Art and Columbia University’s Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, where it will become more accessible to the public for viewing and scholarship.

The collection includes more than 23,000 architectural drawings, about 40 large-scale, architectural models, some 44,000 photographs, 600 manuscripts and more than 300,000 pieces of office and personal correspondence. — nytimes.com

"Hammertone is created from a fabric of woven LED strips and paper squares, networked through a series of sensors which read the aural vibrations created by the artists - responding through light, shadow and geometry." — MocoLoco

Being a successful collector or dealer does not qualify one to make substantial decisions towards our collective cultural patrimony. — art&education

Though the panelists agreed that the foreclosure crisis will lead to major changes in suburban development, they all thought new patterns are less likely to be brought about by a revised American dream than by economic and demographic factors. And all said it would be very difficult to change zoning laws to permit denser new development patterns, especially in existing “inner-ring” suburbs. — archrecord.construction.com

one driving idea of the show holds firm, Bergdoll’s binder notwithstanding: Suburbs are generally an architect-free zone. Insofar as such creatures are spied at all, they’re employed to rubber-stamp a builder’s plans. Beyond that, they’re not wanted. Suburbanites are conservative, wherever they might lie on the political spectrum: There’s a good reason why builders have kept on churning out houses which have remained essentially the same for decades, even as they have grown steadily in size. — architectmagazine.com

Foreclosed, a new exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, shows ways of radically rethinking suburbia, homeownership and housing. But are such drastic measures what the suburbs really need? — Next American City