NEW YORK -- At 2 Columbus Circle, has Brad Cloepfil been foiled by the ghost of Edward Durell Stone?
Surprisingly and entertainingly enough, it sure looks that way. As a result, Saturday's opening of the new home for the Museum of Arts and Design -- Cloepfil's attempt to mummify Stone's 1964 building at the same site -- hardly looks poised to succeed as an act of architectural closure. Instead, it may only remind many New Yorkers that idiosyncratic, romantic architecture like Stone's is increasingly rare and valuable these days in Manhattan, an island being slowly overtaken by a phalanx of straight-backed glass towers.
For nearly a decade, controversy has shrouded the former home of the Gallery of Modern Art, a 10-story structure on the southern edge of Columbus Circle, overlooking a major entrance to Central Park. In 1964, the eccentric collector Huntington Hartford, heir to the A&P supermarket fortune, opened a museum at that location. Its contents were crammed inside a marble-draped box by Stone, an American architect born in 1902 who would go on to design the Kennedy Center in Washington, the late Busch Stadium in St. Louis and a clutch of buildings at the center of the USC campus.
Stone's museum was barely taken seriously as a piece of architecture, at least at first. New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable famously dismissed it as a kitschy, frilly bit of nothingness; referring to the way the facade, a filigreed, windowless marble slab, sat heavily atop a row of dainty ground-floor columns, she labeled it a "Venetian palazzo on lollipops."
But in recent decades many New Yorkers developed a real fondness for it -- some in spite of their otherwise sophisticated taste. It may not have been an easy building to like in 1964. But in the last years of its life, the very traits that had turned a generation of critics against it -- its punched decoration and breezy, lighthearted historicism, in particular -- led many of us younger ones to admire it.
Hartford closed his museum in 1969, and eventually the property passed into the hands of the city of New York. In recent years, the city rejected a rising chorus of demands that it hold a hearing on the building's worthiness as a landmark and in 2002 sold it to the Museum of Arts and Design, formerly the American Craft Museum. MAD, in turn, hired Cloepfil, who runs an increasingly prominent firm based in Portland, Ore., called Allied Works Architecture.
