Cloepfil is in many ways the anti-Edward Durell Stone. His work is precise, cerebral and humorless where Stone's was sugary and rather undisciplined. If Stone hoped in the latter decades of his long career to loosen architecture from the strictures of pure Modernism, Cloepfil wants to tie the restraints back on. And then double-knot them.
On Columbus Circle, plenty of restraints were already built in for Cloepfil, including limits on the height and width of any new piece of architecture. As a result, he embarked on a process that he says was more like "editing" an existing building than creating a new one. (If so, he is a rather aggressive editor -- an architectural version, perhaps, of Knopf's Gordon Lish, who ruthlessly pared Raymond Carver's short fiction to the bone.) He decided to keep Stone's concrete skeleton intact and drape a new skin, made of iridescent terra-cotta tiles, over it. He then proposed carving a series of narrow bands into the concrete.
The bands, which Cloepfil has called "continuous ribbons of light," travel in right-angled patterns up the front and sides of the building. They slice its concrete shell into a series of interlocking cantilevered sections, giving the museum's four facades a blunt geometric power.
And here's where the story takes a beautifully strange twist. At the very end of the design process, MAD's director, Holly Hotchner, and the museum's board demanded that a band of windows be added to the ninth-floor restaurant. This is not an uncommon request from one of Cloepfil's clients, since the architect is as often more interested in restricting views than indulging them. As a designer, he has a punitive streak, and takes a perverse pleasure in keeping his buildings closed off and mute.
This is true in his recent addition to the Seattle Art Museum, where he opens up views of Elliott Bay only to screen, block or otherwise frustrate them. It is even more true in his design for MAD, which makes a point of pretending that it doesn't face one of the great urban vistas in the world, right where the Manhattan grid meets the leafy spread of Central Park.
Cloepfil fought the idea of a new ninth-floor window band strenuously, to no avail. Added as a horizontal strip near the top of the main facade, the windows wound up connecting a pair of vertical bands already in place to form the shape of the letter H. Another vertical band at the same level, on the western facade of the building, reads quite clearly as an I.
