The flurry of criticism that erupted when MoMA announced its plans to demolish the American Folk Art Museum (in its new plans for expansion, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro) has yet to settle. After the break, we offer a more complete round-up of the critics' reactions - including Paul Goldberger's of Vanity Fair, Michael Kimmelman's for The New York Times, and more...
Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times: "MoMA's Plan to Demolish Folk Art Museum Lacks Vision"
A city presents endless constraints out of which creativity emerges, or it doesn’t. There were plenty of good reasons to raze the old Pennsylvania Station 50 years ago, but that didn’t mean that it was wise. It would be truly radical for MoMA to save the former folk art building, but that’s not what the museum has ever really been about. MoMA wants more gallery space, and the expansion that drives the planned demolition is just more MoMA madness....the fabric of the surrounding streets does need more outliers like the former American Folk Art Museum building to stem the increasing monotony of glass towers. MoMA, far from being one of those outliers, has pretty much become like Extell and other Midtown developers, waiting to gobble up property and expand its own shiny glass palace.MoMA is now as jammed and joyless as the Van Wyck Expressway on a Friday in July. That’s not because it is a victim of its own success; it’s because the museum is a victim of its own philosophy. This is not just nostalgia talking.Wedged onto a narrow plot, the ill-fated folk art building is far from perfect. Inside, it’s mostly stairwells and passages, its galleries tricky to install. But the eccentricity helps to account for what endears it to architects. Those bespoke, domestic-size spaces, like the building’s sober hammered bronze facade, share something with the handicraft of the folk art museum’s collection; the building has a rootedness, a materiality, an outsize claim to significance. It stands proudly on the street, the unfashionable antithesis of generic, open-ended modernism, the opposite of what Diller Scofidio now envisions in its place, with its paradigm of indefinite and perishable culture.
