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

Atterwasch is tiny, its single street lined with sturdy brick and stone houses. The village has a single church whose bells peal out at noon each day, a small volunteer fire department, and a cemetery with a special section devoted to German soldiers who died nearby in the closing months of WWII.

Atterwasch may soon be gone.

Vattenfall, a Swedish energy company, hopes to relocate the village and its residents in order to strip-mine the ground underneath for lignite, or "brown coal." — news.nationalgeographic.com

What a National Register [of Historic Places] listing really means is a 20% federal tax credit for structural investing, along with any state tax incentives, but that's often not enough to make preservation a more appealing option over razing and starting over. [...]

Listing on the National Register certainly gives something of an economic incentive for preservation, as well as a national profile for these sites [...]

However, what historic sites ultimately need is sustainable funding. — Atlas Obscura

“All of us who knew them thought this was going to be pretty much a slam dunk — that they would save the Folk Art Museum,” said Peter Wheelwright, a former chairman of the architecture program at Parsons, the New School for Design. “I knew they were capable of doing it and that, because of their friendship, that they would make a sincere, genuine, wholehearted effort.” — NY Times

"During that time, Ireland allowed a kind of honor code building inspection. The result is that many people paid high prices for houses that are fire hazards or sinking in bogs or are built with faulty foundations or missing drainage systems, a problem that is even harder and more expensive to solve." — NYT

Many of the contested demolitions in 2013 involved structures that were once considered innovative, but just a few decades later, have been labeled "obsolete." This fact heats up some food for thought: Just how future-proof are the "futuristic" buildings that are being proposed and built now? — theatlanticcities.com

Shivihah Smith’s East Baltimore neighborhood, where he lives with his mother and grandmother, is disappearing. The block one over is gone. A dozen rowhouses on an adjacent block were removed one afternoon last year. [...]

For the Smiths, the bulldozing of city blocks is a source of anguish. But for Baltimore, as for a number of American cities in the Northeast and Midwest that have lost big chunks of their population, it is increasingly regarded as a path to salvation. — nytimes.com

The Buffalo Planning Board will be reviewing plans to construct 48 apartments in eight new buildings next week. The complex at 270 Niagara Street sits in the shadow of City Hall. It currently contains 472 units on 9.5 acres and was completed in 1972. — Buffalo Rising

This week, as Goldberg’s famous work is pulled apart by wreckers, nothing about its loss seems symmetrical or graceful. Within 40 years, the building transitioned from a proud symbol of civic renewal and design innovation to the victim of old-fashioned Chicago politics. The controversy surrounding the demolition of Prentice, however, injected the preservation movement into an urban design discussion with a presence not seen in a long time. — nextcity.org

"Thanks to Data Driven Detroit, there is now an interactive map of the city's demo activity, covering both planned demolitions and those that have taken place since 2010." — Curbed: Detroit

The demolition took place at night in the Chinese city of Wuhan. With 100,000 volt wiring running alongside the viaduct and 30 major gas pipelines underneath it, explosives experts were faced with a task requiring particular precision. The two mile long viaduct was the longest concrete bridge ever demolished in China. — telegraph.co.uk

The modernist five-story glass and steel structure was an attempt by city leaders to shake off the city’s image as a retirement destination. Even more radical was its inverted pyramid shape, chosen by architect William B. Harvard to make the most use of the limited space at the pierhead without blocking views of the city and Tampa Bay. — tbo.com

One Herald Plaza, the bayfront behemoth from which generations of journalists fanned out across South Florida — and at times the world — to cover the news, passed into history on Thursday after succumbing to a real estate deal.
… She was 60. — jimromenesko.com

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