What I’ll miss during the Museum of Modern Art’s four-month public shutdown is something I’ve already been missing for five years and will probably continue to miss when the expanded museum reopens in October. I’m talking about the presence on West 53rd Street of the American Folk Art Museum, which was physically demolished in 2014, and whose site the expanded MoMA absorbs, but whose spirit lives on as a restless ghost in the corporate machine that MoMA is. — The New York Times

It is not the first time, though, that a design like this has been pitched for the university. However inadvertently, the DS+R design resembles another proposal for the campus—a draft project that was eventually revised. While the resemblance between two draft renderings is hardly consequential, this one comes as a surprise, given the nature of the projects and the history between the firms. — City Lab

Gone is the “Art Bay,” with a glass garage-like door that would have allowed visitors to enter galleries straight from the street.

Gone, too, is the fourth-floor “Gray Box,” with acoustic absorption panels through which passers-by could have peered up at performance art in progress.

And there will be no new public entrance to the sculpture garden on 54th Street.

The Museum of Modern Art has eliminated these polarizing elements of its sweeping redesign, museum officials said on Tuesday... — the New York Times

Artist and animator Sam Grinberg revisits the fight over the future of the American Folk Art Museum. — ny.curbed.com

[...] 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

“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

"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