“The public is invited into the process very late,” said Nicolai Ouroussoff, the architecture critic, referring to the decision by the Museum of Modern Art and its architects, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, to tear down the former home of the American Folk Art Museum, which stands in the way of MoMA’s recently announced expansion. And Ouroussoff was right: Eight hundred people turned out for what was, in effect, a town hall meeting on the demolition of the Tod Williams Billie Tsien building, which heated up a Manhattan auditorium on a very cold night. But then, after nearly two hours of
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) announced today that in its next phase of expansion, it will tear down the 2001 American Folk Art Museum building designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects.
In typical Robert Moses fashion, when a 1961 urban renewal project added an ice skating rink to a blighted section of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, it came along with an imposing facility and a 250-car parking lot. The change took a chip out of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s diamond-shaped masterpiece, cutting off a lake at the southern end of the park from the broad pathway that winds around its perimeter.
In this issue of RECORD, we explore works of architecture as urban catalysts—buildings that raise the stakes for design in their neighborhoods while successfully engaging the surrounding context.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York announced today that it has commissioned Diller Scofidio + Renfro to plan an expasion into the former site of the American Folk Art Museum.
While battles over the fate of Tod Williams Billie Tsien’s American Folk Art Museum and other public buildings make headlines, the architecture world also faces a much bigger, but far less visible, challenge: preserving private homes when families who have protected them—sometimes for four decades or more—decide to sell.
A slew of high-profile architects and critics, including Annabelle Selldorf, Steven Holl, Wendy Evans Joseph, Thom Mayne, Richard Meier, Michael Sorkin, and Robert A.M. Stern, have joined the campaign to save the American Folk Art Museum building.
Five days after the Museum of Modern Art announced it would raze the former home of the American Folk Art Museum (which it purchased in 2011) for a planned expansion, the controversy continues to simmer.
In this issue of RECORD, we explore works of architecture as urban catalysts—buildings that raise the stakes for design in their neighborhoods while successfully engaging the surrounding context.
