But last week, that firm’s architects joined with Glenn D. Lowry, MoMA’s director, to say that, unfortunately, the building needs to be torn down after all. They saw no way around it.
.../...MoMA and Diller Scofidio hoped to sweeten the pill by promising improvements to the museum’s lobby and opening its sculpture garden to the public free during museum hours. They also propose, in place of the razed building, a Gray Box for performances, above an Art Bay, with a retractable glass wall and spaces for yet-to-be-conceived presentations, visible from the street.
.../...Wedged onto a narrow plot, the ill-fated folk art building is far from perfect. Inside, it’s mostly stairwells and passages, its galleries tricky to install. But the eccentricity helps to account for what endears it to architects. Those bespoke, domestic-size spaces, like the building’s sober hammered bronze facade, share something with the handicraft of the folk art museum’s collection; the building has a rootedness, a materiality, an outsize claim to significance. It stands proudly on the street, the unfashionable antithesis of generic, open-ended modernism, the opposite of what Diller Scofidio now envisions in its place, with its paradigm of indefinite and perishable culture.
.../... more here.
