Robert A. M. Stern, an architect whose chameleon-like sense of style has brought him his own share of criticism, wrote a defense of Edward Durell Stone’s most controversial work, Two Columbus Circle. It is a building best referred to by its address, since its days as the Huntington Hartford gallery are long past, its more recent days as a home for a New York City cultural affairs department are also ended, and it now sits unoccupied and surrounded in chain link and bums, in the shadow of the nearly complete monolithic AOL Time Warner Center. Plans were released in the last several months to turn the bones of the building–but not its distinctive windowless shell–into a new home for the Museum of Arts and Design. So no one seems quite sure what to call it.
No one has ever seemed quite sure what to call it stylistically. Stone began his professional life as an International Style Modernist, as Stern points out in his brief essay, which is published on the homepage of Preserve & Protect. Stone’s design with Philip Goodwin for the Museum of Modern Art’s main building on 53rd St. is being preserved as part of a huge renovation project. But that building is a landmark, and happens to be owned by MoMA, an early proponent and usually staunch defender of Modernism.
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