That's right: On its two most prominent facades, the building now spells out the word "Hi," as peppy as Kathie Lee Gifford at 9 in the morning. And the message is not hidden or cryptic. It's delivered in letters five stories high facing Columbus Circle -- a massive architectural text message.
Actually, a message from a Ouija board may be closer to the truth. It's as if Stone, his architecture muffled and disregarded by Cloepfil, MAD and the city of New York, managed to have the last word on the preservation controversy, popping up from beyond the grave to say hello. The fact that the word in question is unpretentious and loosely informal makes it deliciously Stone-like, and allows it to undermine the severity and cold perfectionism of Cloepfil's exterior all the more.
Inside, of course, the museum's talking facade ceases to be an issue. The Gallery of Modern Art's lavish interiors have been replaced with handsome polished wood floors, white walls and an aggressively utilitarian, unadorned series of concrete staircases. Inside the small galleries, which fill the second through fifth floors, Cloepfil's ribbons act as unifying elements, traveling across the floor, then running up the wall before turning again just below the ceiling and operating as clerestory windows. These are extremely well-crafted spaces, if a little dark. In the lobby, Cloepfil has left the lollipop columns intact -- though from the sidewalk they are obscured by frosted glass -- and created a cool, handsome entry space. From there, a broad stair leads down to Stone's basement auditorium, with its buttery bronze accents, which Cloepfil and Allied Works have restored and updated.
To be sure, Cloepfil's reimagining of the Stone building has a clean-lined, clear-headed appeal. The terra-cotta tiles on the exterior have an enigmatic charisma -- their color seems to shift throughout the day -- though it's too bad Cloepfil didn't bring them down below the second story, so visitors could run their fingers over them and see them up close.
But as was the case at the Seattle Art Museum, where Cloepfil was hired to extend a 1991 confection by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, trying to update an impish older building doesn't cast his own approach in the best light. Allowed to stand on their own feet, Cloepfil's designs look crisp and impressively sure of themselves. But when they're laid next to -- or, in this case, pulled tightly over -- an older building with a gregarious sense of humor or history, they begin to seem clinical and rigid, even schoolmarmish.
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christopher.hawthorne @latimes.com
