Coda on 2 Columbus Circle
From the New York Times
June 5, 2007
Renovation Slowly Adds Some Light to Lollipops
By ROBIN POGREBIN
The controversial white block of a building is still shrouded in dark netting. The hard-hatted men perched on the surrounding scaffolding won’t wrap up their work until the middle of next year. But behind the scrim, the “lollipop” building at 2 Columbus Circle is steadily changing into a new home for the Museum of Arts and Design.
Two years ago, preservationists lost a battle to prevent radical alterations to the 1964 building, which was originally designed by the architect Edward Durell Stone. It was a long and bitter fight, with city officials and preservationists crossing swords over whether it was a Modernist landmark or an eyesore — and whether a redesign would amount to a shortsighted pastiche.
Strolling through the building on a recent afternoon, the architect for the renovations, Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture, emphasized that he had sought neither to erase the history of Stone’s building nor to content himself with a superficial makeover. “Part of the intent was to preserve key memories of the building — the shape, the scale,” he said. “It’s still an idiosyncratic building. It’s still a monolith in Columbus Circle. There are many ways to preserve something without just a stylistic overlay.”
The biggest difference between old and new seems to be the light. Rooms that were once dim and subdivided are now wide open and full of sun. Slices into the once-opaque facade have opened views of Central Park to the north and the Hudson River to the west.
“Now that you can see the spaces, it’s really exciting,” said Mr. Cloepfil, who redesigned the building in collaboration with Gary Edward Handel & Associates.
“I love to think of it as editing,” he said of the renovations. “You’re basically taking a building apart as much as possible while it’s still standing.”
He said the exterior was largely intact, except for the cuts and a new cladding in iridescent white terra cotta that will be installed over the summer. All but one of the street-level lollipop shapes have survived, in part because they had to as structural supports for the building.
But the lollipops will now be behind glass, since the lobby will extend toward the sidewalk. And the building’s signature portholes are gone, along with Stone’s Venetian-style loggia.
Preservationists had argued that the redesign would erase the historical importance of the building, which originally housed a supermarket magnate’s art gallery and later, the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs. Mr. Cloepfil said that he did not dismiss the preservationists’ concerns but wished the debate had been framed differently. “It could have been a more fascinating conversation about the nature of preservation,” he said. “The debate never got beyond whether this piece of work merited critical preservation.”
“I think it’s a debate that needs to happen; the old criteria don’t really apply anymore,” he added. “That’s part of the lost opportunity of this building.”
There were larger questions worth considering, he said, like, “Is the iconography the most important thing, or are there other ways to preserve the experience of the building?”
For him, the next question is, “Does it have critical value? And I think the answer is no.”
Mr. Cloepfil also directly took on the project’s most vocal and high-profile critic, the architect Robert A. M. Stern, who is also dean of Yale’s School of Architecture. Mr. Stern had argued that the building was an important example of postwar design. “It was really an attempt at historicism — a desperate gasp at historicism,” Mr. Cloepfil said, as if Mr. Stern were bent on romanticizing the recent past, as opposed to rethinking it.
What Mr. Cloepfil sees as his “primary act of architecture” at 2 Columbus Circle are the two-foot cuts in the walls and floors, which will be filled by barely translucent glass. “By making a two-foot cut, a three-dimensional incision, it completely opens the space up,” he said. “The metaphor I use is, it’s like taking away the seam of the shirt. The shirt is still intact, but you opened it up at all the intersections.”
The floor cuts create a sense of connection, the architect said, so that a museum visitor will always sense “that something is above you and something is below you.” The vertical wall cuts “connect you to the city,” he said, while the horizontal cuts fill the galleries with natural light.
Yet in some ways, the renovation is more noteworthy for what has been taken out than what has been put in. To maximize the available space on four gallery floors, the architects moved the mechanical systems behind the elevator bank and put the restrooms below ground, by the auditorium, and on the sixth floor, which will be home to the museum’s education department. They also took various staircases away. About 300 tons of concrete were hauled off the site, along with 47,000 square feet of surface materials.
“Because we’re working within the existing envelope, part of the quest was to give the museum as much new space as possible,” Mr. Cloepfil said.
The museum, which focuses on crafts, art and design, is struggling to accommodate all of its operations in 17,000 square feet in its current site on West 53rd Street. The square footage will more than triple, to 54,000 — 14,000 of which is gallery space. “One floor of this building is the size of our whole museum now — the two main galleries,” said Holly Hotchner, the museum’s director. “When you imagine how robust the exhibition program will be as a result of this gained space — we’ll probably have one-third of the permanent collection on view.”
Work on the building is slow going. Scaffolding first went up in fall 2005. “It took over a year to take the building apart,” Mr. Cloepfil said. “Essentially what we’ve done is take away as much of the building as possible without totally restructuring it.”
In the lobby, he pointed to where the main entrance will be on the north side of the building, and to the location of a planned store and information desk. Where now there is a gaping chasm, there will be a staircase suspended by cables leading from the first-floor galleries down to the basement auditorium.
From dawn to dusk, the terra-cotta facade will subtly change in color, its sheen varying from purple to orange to gold to green.
But Mr. Cloepfil asserts that the central experience of the building — its quiet solidity — will remain as it was. Even as he was pointing out all the changes to 2 Columbus Circle, the architect kept emphasizing how the building’s role in the city had not really changed.
“All we’ve done is remove things,” he said. “A lot of what holds people’s memory of this place is still intact.”
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
Now that you’ve read his words, see his work: Experiencing Brad Cloepfil’s Vision