Museum of Arts & Design
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The Museum of Arts & Design (MAD), based in Manhattan, New York City, USA, is one of the world’s foremost resource centers for the collection, preservation, study, and display of contemporary hand-made objects in a variety of media, including: clay, glass, metal, fiber, and wood. The museum was founded by philanthropist Aileen Osborn Webb in 1956 as the Museum of Contemporary Crafts.
In 1986, it relocated to 40 West 53rd and was renamed the American Craft Museum. In 2002 it changed its name again to the Museum of Arts & Design. It accommodates 300,000 visitors per year, however, touring exhibitions, outreach efforts, and off-site programs effectively double that audience.
In 2008, the museum will move to 2 Columbus Circle. With more than 54,000 square feet the new location will be more than three times the size of the Museum’s current space. It will include: four floors of exhibition galleries for works by established and emerging artists; a 150-seat auditorium in which the museum plans to feature lectures, films, and performances; and a restaurant. The new location will also include a Center for the Study of Jewelry, and an Education Center that will offer multi-media access to primary source material, hands-on classrooms for students, and three artists-in-residence studios.
The museum's new location was developed by Brad Cloepfil and his Portland, Oregon-based firm Allied Works Architecture [1]. The redesigned building will include a terra-cotta facade, and varied kinds of glass: clear, fritted, and translucent. Its glazed, nacreous ceramic exterior will change color at different viewing angles.
An article in the New York Times [2] acknowledged that when Holly Hotchner first became the director of the institution ten years ago "few people seemed to have heard of it." Today the museum is perhaps best know for "the bitter preservation battle arose over its purchase and planned renovation of 2 Columbus Circle, the 1964 'lollipop' building near Central Park designed by Edward Durell Stone." Although, Ms. Hotchner said she "hopes it will become known for what it does, not where it is."
The museum's plans to radically alter Stone's original design touched off an preservation battle joined by Tom Wolfe, 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. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Ada Louise Huxtable, and others, however, praised the redevelopment of this long derelict site. Before the building's alterations, 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."
[edit] Sources
- 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
