Museum of Arts & Design

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Museum of Arts & Design
Established	1956
Location	40 West 53rd Street New York, NY, USA
Type	Art museum
Director	Holly Hotchner
Website	http://www.madmuseum.org/

The Museum of Arts & Design (MAD), based in Manhattan in New York, New York, is a center for the collection, preservation, study, and display of contemporary hand-made objects in a variety of media, including: clay, glass, metal, fiber, and wood.

It accommodates 300,000 visitors per year, however, touring exhibitions, outreach efforts, and off-site programs effectively double that audience.

1 History
2 Controversial Redesign of 2 Columbus Circle
3 See also
4 External links
5 References

[edit] History

The museum was founded in 1956 by philanthropist Aileen Osborn Webb, 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.

[edit] Controversial Redesign of 2 Columbus Circle

The original design of the Edward Durell Stone building in 2 Columbus Circle.

Museum of Arts & Design at 2 Columbus Circle, nearly completed in April 2008. The redesigned building now seems to spell the letters "HI" in its gray paneling.

In 2008, the museum will complete a controversial move to 2 Columbus Circle.

The new location, with more than 54,000 square feet, will more than triple 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. It 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.

However, the museum's plans to radically alter the building's original design by Edward Durell Stone touched off a 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, supported the redevelopment of a long neglected site. Stone's son Hicks, also an architect, favored preservation and was appalled that "an institution whose central mission is to preserve cultural artifacts is in fact determined to demolish what is probably its most valuable artifact." [1]

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."^[1]^[2] In 2004, the National Trust for Historic Preservation called it one of America's "11 Most Endangered Historic Places."

The museum's new location is being developed by Brad Cloepfil and his Portland, Oregon-based firm Allied Works Architecture. The redesigned building includes a glazed terra-cotta and glass facade. Its nacreous ceramic exterior is said to change color at different viewing angles, although eyewitnesses of the redesign have compared the new facade to "suburban aluminum siding" and noted that the building now seems to spell the German word "HEIL" in its gray paneling. ^[3] ^[4] ^[5]

An article in the New York Times 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 may be 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." Ms. Hotchner said she "hopes it will become known for what it does, not where it is."^[6]

The design has received almost completely negative comments in feedback on the New York Times website. [2] [3] Of the newly uncovered redesign, James Gardner, architecture critic for the NY Sun wrote:

Say what you want about Stone’s building, it was indubitably a landmark; the best that can be said for its replacement is that, if we’re lucky, no one will ever notice it...A thought occurs that might help us out of our newfangled mess: Assuming that what was done to the interior is what needed to be done all along, it might be relatively easy — not now of course, but after a decent interval of, say, five years — to restore the original façade. [4]