Six weeks ago MoMA announced that it would raze the Tod Williams and Billie Tsien-designed building on West 53rd Street that originally housed the American Folk Art Museum (AFAM). In its place MoMA wanted to build one to properly connect its existing building, just to the east, with the new Jean Nouvel-designed tower it's building, just to the west. Then last week MoMA announced that it was reconsidering. Many had opposed the proposed demolition, including AFAM’s architects, architecture critics, and even MoMA’s Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, Barry Bergdoll. But, if art critic Jerry Saltz’s commentary in New York Magazine is any indication, the art world is less concerned about it. Saltz argues that the building served architecture far better than it served art, and supports its removal with a directness that approaches zeal.
It’s sad to see any building razed, especially one as architecturally ambitious and distinctive and AFAM, and one that’s only twelve years old. Yet I’m unmoved about seeing it go. AFAM sold the building to MoMA and left, and it occupies a key property within the MoMA campus. From the outside the AFAM building has never felt like a part of midtown Manhattan. Its signature super-tall bronze facade panels are uncomfortably overscaled – unrelated to the scale of surrounding facades – and, when seen from the sidewalk, have a dull, mottled surface that feels unfinished. On an isolated site in the woods the building might cut a dramatic figure, a post-Brutalist megalith, but on a dense block in Midtown, rubbing shoulders with towers dressed in limestone and glass, it feels overly rugged, like a cocktail party guest in a parka. Inside, the museum is spatially and sculpturally dynamic, but doesn’t carve out substantial spaces and surfaces for display. Nearly half of each floor plate is given over to three staircases and an elevator. Artworks are scattered all over the inner skin of the building, in corners and nooks and along stairwells, giving the place an eccentric, unorganized feeling. My lack of sentimentality about razing AFAM is linked directly to my persistent nostalgia for the original, intimate MoMA building, which I remember, along with the installations of many of the individual artworks housed inside, from childhood. After that building was swallowed up inside Yoshio Taniguchi’s 2004 expansion, I have little ardor left to preserve museum buildings, especially on this block. MoMA has evolved as a corporate entity, amassing properties in midtown the way New York University does in Greenwich Village. I didn’t flinch as I read in the Times that the AFAM building might be gone before the end of the year, but I did when I read that the MoMA board is currently chaired by Tishman Speyer head Jerry I. Speyer. Museum leadership is running the place with a developer’s eye, designing a signature property rather than a temple for art. It’s this same mentality that led to the construction of the AFAM building in the first place. Let’s see if MoMA, in its upcoming expansion, can hit both marks.