Ada Louise Huxtable Doesn't Like 2CC, Didn't Like 2CC and Never Liked 2CC
From the Wall Street Journal
Setting the Record Straight about Ed Stone and Brad Cloepfil
By ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE
New York
It may seem low on anyone’s list of priorities at this moment of political change and economic crisis, but now that Ed Stone’s little seraglio has been converted into the new home of the Museum of Arts and Design and the reviews have set some kind of record for irresponsible over-the-top building-bashing, it is time to look at the facts and close the books on 2 Columbus Circle.
![[Ed Stone and Brad Cloepfil]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-CU209_design_DV_20081208173057.jpg)
Hlne Binet
The bitter controversy over whether to save the building’s Scheherazade façade or accept the radical redesign needed to serve the new museum went beyond the local and parochial to a total breakdown of objective evaluation that silenced more responsible voices and threatened the hard-won credibility and authority of the preservation movement. Real issues were abandoned for the elevation of feeling over reason and a win-at-any-cost mentality. The invention of instant mythologies fed the studious evasion of unwelcome facts. It was an unworthy performance that did little credit to anyone who cares about preservation and can only serve as an object lesson of how not to go about it.
In such a poisoned atmosphere, it has been all but impossible to judge the successes or failures of the completed redesign. For many, the movie-set lushness of the not-to-be-taken-too-seriously galleries of modern art as defined and built by Huntington Hartford in 1964, consisting almost entirely of richly carpeted stairs topped by an irresistible Polynesian luau, stranded incongruously in the grimy traffic tangle of Columbus Circle, was an endearing aberration in a city where such things are all too rare. For the generation that had made the building a popular gathering place in the 1960s when they were newly arrived in New York and enchanted by its romance, the loss of this symbolic Shangri-La was too painful to contemplate. For others, the appeal was muted and the architecture second-rate. Some, like Philip Kennicott writing at a safe distance in the Washington Post, found it a hard building to love or hate. And so a mythology of its architectural significance had to be created for its defense, a well-promoted popular misconception that this observer, present then and now, would like to set straight.
While I respect the revisionist impulse, I simply do not buy the argument that this little building was a bellwether of the postmodern movement, or that its architect, Ed Stone, was a prophet who made the break with orthodox modernism, as its champions claim. That assertion is specious history. Stone’s charming potboiler has been falsely elevated by wishful hindsight. This was never an act of creative insurrection; it was accidental postmodernism, coinciding serendipitously with an awakening interest in more expressive referential and decorative enrichment. Two Columbus Circle was on the down curve of an architect who had done his best work in the 1930s; Stone’s stunning A. Conger Goodyear house, in Old Westbury, Long Island, and the first Museum of Modern Art, designed with Philip Goodwin, were radical structures that introduced modernism to this country.
His career was subsequently destroyed by alcoholism, and there was a long, fallow period until a new marriage returned him to sobriety and reinvented him as a new architect, Edward Durrell Stone. We who had known and admired him as Ed Stone were summarily informed by his wife and his publicists that he was to be called Edward Durrell Stone from then on.
As Edward Durrell Stone he designed a much admired American Embassy in New Delhi that featured decorative screens. Screens sold; they were instantly popular with clients, appearing on everything from universities to pharmaceutical plants, in work otherwise undistinguished in quality and uninspired in plan. The ultimate klunker was Washington’s Kennedy Center. Somewhere behind those screens, Ed Stone the architect was buried.
![[Ed Stone and Brad Cloepfil]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-CU213_design_D_20081208173552.jpg)
Hlne Binet
However, if faux history does not support a cause, neither does ignoring facts because they are obstacles to desires. The structural report on 2 Columbus Circle found the screen past reasonable preservation or repair. Granted that such reports should be looked at with a skeptical eye, but this one appears not to have been looked at by anyone at all. The fasteners holding the marble to the underlying frame were not all stainless steel; many had rusted and much of the marble had discolored and spalled. The façade would have had to be replaced at great expense, still with no idea of how the building could be saved.
And right here I part company with those who believe that copies and replicas are acceptable substitutes for the real thing. Once the original is gone or beyond salvation you are faking it; when it’s lost, let it go and move on. Blind sentiment and perverse tunnel vision kept the argument going.
Two Columbus Circle had been owned by the city but not occupied for some time; it was now in serious disrepair. The city decided to sell the building to a cultural institution that had been looking for a home, the American Craft Museum, later renamed the Museum of Arts and Design. But because this would mean extensive redesign with no guarantee that the screen would survive, the opposition cried chicanery and foul. The sale went through, and a rising American architect, Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture, was hired for the job.
The building’s distinctive shape and size has been kept, but the interior was gutted for more usable gallery space. The fairy-tale façade was stripped to allow the insertion of an updated vapor barrier required by the new museum and the replacement of outmoded systems between inner and outer walls. The most challenging problem was bringing light into the virtually windowless building. Because 2 Columbus Circle is a monolithic, poured-in-place concrete structure, the openings had to be limited and made in a manner that would not affect its structural integrity, a design and engineering feat few have bothered to notice.
Mr. Cloepfil’s unusual solution cuts narrow, ribbonlike strips in a tight geometric pattern across the building’s surface that continue three-dimensionally through the inside as light slots along ceilings and floors. Running along the tops of galleries and down the walls, the strips frame stunningly focused views of Columbus Circle, Central Park, and the surrounding city. But this three-dimensional concept is not easy to grasp, nor, seen just from the outside, does it seduce the eye. Mr. Cloepfil is a very cool, very restrained architect with a minimalist sensibility; his work is out of sync with a public increasingly desensitized by today’s can-you-top-this hypersensationalism and the expectation of in-your-face “icons.” From Arabian Nights romance to rigid geometry is a big leap. And something has gone noticeably wrong.
This is a precisely calibrated aesthetic that can be destroyed by one bad move, and that move has been the late insertion of a picture window on the restaurant floor. The client insisted and the architect resisted, and we will never know when and where the relationship fell apart — but at some point it obviously did, and so did the design. There were other sticking points, but this is the one that counts. The eternal banality of the picture window is forever with us, the lessons of the vignetted view never learned, even as we have developed techniques and materials that make such subtleties possible. We persist in the denial of a visual principle that artists have understood for centuries. Everyone has to sit smack up against the glass.
Even with the building’s flaws, however, criticism of the structure has been alarmingly out of proportion and flagrantly out of control. The unreasoning rejection of the solution carried over into a reluctance, or inability, to see anything good about the result. This is a thoughtful and skillful, if imperfect conversion, with the enormous added value of an inviting new cultural facility as part of the handsomely upgraded landscaping and glossily rebuilt commercial mix of a reborn Columbus Circle. The ghosts of Araby still linger in the lollipop structural supports of the ground floor, and the ’60s glitter alluringly in the perfectly restored auditorium. The custom-crafted iridescent white ceramic tiles of the façade change gently with the light. The building has presence, not prettiness; it has acquired form and focus. Mr. Cloepfil has turned camp into architecture.
And there is enchantment inside. As craft has been broadened and redefined by the museum, the exhibits explore a special place between the grim seriousness of high art and the frivolities of fashion. It is easy art, ranging from truly beautiful to borderline kitsch, devoted to the pure pleasure of the eye. Too bad the unforgiving opposition can’t enjoy it.
Ms. Huxtable is the Journal’s architecture critic. “On Architecture,” an anthology of columns from the 1960s to the present, has just been published by Walker & Co.
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