Museum of Arts & Design

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The Museum of Arts & Design (MAD), formerly known as the American Craft Museum or Museum of Contemporary Crafts, is based in Manhattan, New York City, USA. Since 1956, is has collected and exhibited American craft objects created in media such as clay, glass, wood, metal, and fiber. Since 1956, it has served as the country’s premier institution dedicated to the collection and exhibition of contemporary objects. The seed for the Museum was planted more than 60 years ago, when Aileen Osborn Webb, the nation’s premier craft patron and benefactor, established the American Craftsmen's Council in 1942.

The Council's original goal was to recognize the work of American craftspeople and to make the general public aware of the vitality that contemporary craft expression could bring to an age of machine-made products. The Council created educational programs and competitions that promoted technical excellence among craftspeople and celebrated the beauty of the handmade object. The success of these programs revealed a need for a museum dedicated to contemporary American craft.

The Museum has since broadened its vision and expanded the scope of its exhibitions and programs. Today it celebrates materials and processes that are embraced by practitioners in the fields of craft, art, and design, as well as architecture, fashion, interior design, technology, performing arts, and art and design-driven industries. The institution’s new name, adopted in 2002, reflects this wider spectrum of interest, as well as the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of the Museum’s permanent collection and exhibition programming.

Proposed changes to the building by architect Brad Cloepfil and his Portland, Oregon-based firm Allied Works Architecture [1] touched off a preservation debate joined by Tom Wolfe (The New York Times; October 12, 2003 and October 13, 2003), Chuck Close, Frank Stella, Robert A. M. Stern, Columbia art history department chairman Barry Bergdoll, New York Times' architecture critics Herbert Muschamp and Nicolai Ouroussoff, urbanist scholar Witold Rybczynski, among others. Stone's design at 2 Columbus Circle was listed as one of the World Monuments Fund's "100 Most Endangered Sites for 2006." In 2004, the National Trust for Historic Preservation called it one of America's "11 Most Endangered Historic Places."

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Chicago Tribune June 22, 2005. Abstract of Discussion on the 2006 list of the world's 100 most endangered artistic, historical and cultural sites.
World Monument Watch - 2 Columbus Circle