2 Columbus Circle Redesign - Orginal: Edward Durell Stone - Redesign: Brad Cloepfil

[BPC]

Originally Posted by BrooklynRider

I hope that every super hero movie, every sci-fi movie, every bank heist and terrorist film made in NYC features the destruction of this building: Missilles, grenade launchers, tanks, bunker busters. Now, THAT would be a good summer flick.

I used to enjoy watching my old office building, One New York Plaza, be destroyed in NYC-based disaster movies. If only it were so.

[Ned Leeds]

Originally Posted by BrooklynRider

I hope that every super hero movie, every sci-fi movie, every bank heist and terrorist film made in NYC features the destruction of this building: Missilles, grenade launchers, tanks, bunker busters. Now, THAT would be a good summer flick.

looks like the under renovation 2CC comes pretty close to gettin' it by way of monster attack in Cloverfield.

[nycstef]

www.nysun.com/calendar/taking-a-fresh-look-at-columbus-circle/83318/

Taking a Fresh Look at Columbus Circle

By FRANCIS MORRONE | August 7, 2008

Columbus Circle has, for most of its history, been a mess. Though at its center is one of the city's finest works of public art — the rostral column bearing a statue of Christopher Columbus — the buildings around it have been mostly banal. The circle had until recently been about as appealing to the pedestrian as the shoulder of an interstate highway.

For years, the old Coliseum dominated the west portion of the circle, and the space became a yawning chasm separating rather than uniting Midtown and the Upper West Side. It created what Jane Jacobs called border vacuums: The circle's vacuity generated an outward-spreading insipid area.

Around 1980, the lay of the circle was thus: Two Columbus Circle had long ceased being Huntington Hartford's spirited venture called the Gallery of Modern Art and was owned by the city; the Coliseum was a slowly putrefying beached whale of an obsolete convention center, deadening to all around it; the Gulf & Western Building, on the north side of the circle, was one of the most banal Modernist office buildings in Manhattan.
Today, the Coliseum has happily yielded to the Time Warner Center. I say "happily" even though I am not wild about the architecture. The Time Warner Center had a long gestation and resulted from many compromises. But in the end, it brought life to the west side of the circle and has all but vanquished our bad memories of the deadweight Coliseum.

People flow into and out of the Time Warner Center, its Whole Foods Market is jam-packed at all hours. The center's restaurants are four-star destinations. Jazz at Lincoln Center offers marvelous programming, and the sidewalks are bright with show windows and streaming pedestrians.
Could it have been better? Sure. But I'd have been pleased if the Coliseum had been replaced by a Toys "R" Us. Who wants to complain that a vividly conceived mixed-use (office, residential, shopping, hotel, and mega-venue for music) complex brought instant life to one of the dreariest spots on the island?

Though that is all to the good, the circle will not be complete. The refacing of 2 Columbus Circle is nearly finished. This Edward Durell Stone building, which housed the Gallery of Modern Art, was for many a kitschy building, though I for one thought it a charming and clever essay in "New Formalism," to use the architectural historian William Jordy's name for the 1960s version of what in the 1980s would be called "PostModernism." The new façade, by Brad Cloepfil and Allied Works Architecture, uses glass bands, or "cuts," rather than conventionally patterned fenestration, across a plane of ceramic tiles glazed so as to change color subtly when viewed in different light conditions. For me, I am sorry to say, it's all scaleless.
Where Stone's original building read as neatly scaled to its setting, Mr. Cloepfil's redesign reads as a piece of abstract sculpture that, at building scale, seems all wrong. I do look forward to the museum's September opening, however, in the hopes of seeing life return to this last dreary flank of the circle.

By far the best building that abuts Columbus Circle is the recently restored 240 Central Park South, at the southeast corner of Broadway, which is looking as good as new. This 1940 masterpiece is one of the best apartment buildings in New York. The architects Albert Mayer and Julian Whittlesey were extremely serious about housing, and worked on model housing and government housing projects for much of their careers. They were philosophically and at times professionally associated with Lewis Mumford. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mumford, writing in the New Yorker magazine in 1940, heaped accolades upon 240 Central Park South. But nothing he said wasn't true.

The building is splendidly massed. On Central Park South, east and west wings project out to meet the sidewalk, while the high center tower, with the building's entrance, is set back from the street behind an anomalous and lovely garden. Above the entrance is a beautiful mosaic mural, "The Quiet City," by Amédée Ozenfant, one of the least known of the most important names in the history of Modernist art. Painter, theorist, and teacher, he was closely associated with Le Corbusier, Fernand Léger, and Erich Mendelsohn, and, after coming to New York in 1939, operated the Ozenfant School of Fine Arts here.

One of the best things about 240 is its Broadway side. Here there is no garden, but rather one-story storefronts jutting out from the main mass of the building and rhythmically cascading along Broadway's diagonal. They provide rhythm and energy to the sidewalk while at the same time forming a buffer between frenetic Broadway and the apartments, which are set well back from the street.

This building negotiated the passage from Art Deco to Modernism, and showed that apart from style a building can respond so sensitively to context that it must be counted as great architecture. It is a lesson that needs desperately to be relearned.

[nycstef]

Even in need of a cleaning, this looks MUCH better to me than the 2008 "Pile of Crap" that's there now!

Originally Posted by philvia

no, but it did spell "1960's Dingy Pile Of Crap"

[MidtownGuy]

That's for sure!! I miss it more everyday, the fenestration, the classy upper arcade of arches. Imagine if it had been polished up, all that wonderful marble. Now we have these half baked tiles that look horrible and a ridiculous zig zag slicing through. One of the biggest architectural crimes of this time in NYC.

[lofter1]

Let's hear it for 240 CPS

This bears repeating -- and highlighting ...

Originally Posted by nycstef

By far the best building that abuts Columbus Circle is the recently restored 240 Central Park South, at the southeast corner of Broadway, which is looking as good as new. This 1940 masterpiece is one of the best apartment buildings in New York. The architects Albert Mayer and Julian Whittlesey were extremely serious about housing, and worked on model housing and government housing projects for much of their careers. They were philosophically and at times professionally associated with Lewis Mumford. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mumford, writing in the New Yorker magazine in 1940, heaped accolades upon 240 Central Park South. But nothing he said wasn't true.

The building is splendidly massed. On Central Park South, east and west wings project out to meet the sidewalk, while the high center tower, with the building's entrance, is set back from the street behind an anomalous and lovely garden. Above the entrance is a beautiful mosaic mural, "The Quiet City," by Amédée Ozenfant, one of the least known of the most important names in the history of Modernist art. Painter, theorist, and teacher, he was closely associated with Le Corbusier, Fernand Léger, and Erich Mendelsohn, and, after coming to New York in 1939, operated the Ozenfant School of Fine Arts here.

One of the best things about 240 is its Broadway side. Here there is no garden, but rather one-story storefronts jutting out from the main mass of the building and rhythmically cascading along Broadway's diagonal. They provide rhythm and energy to the sidewalk while at the same time forming a buffer between frenetic Broadway and the apartments, which are set well back from the street.

This building negotiated the passage from Art Deco to Modernism, and showed that apart from style a building can respond so sensitively to context that it must be counted as great architecture. It is a lesson that needs desperately to be relearned.

[Jasonik]

[nycstef]

The picture included in this New Yorker article adds stripes to erase the "HI" that on top of the facade. Those stripes don't exist, unless they added them in the last day or two. I wonder why they did that in that picture... It seems to be poor journalism especially since the letters on the facade are (I think) the most obviously worst part of the new building.


http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critic...printable=true

Hello, Columbus
A building that can’t break free of its predecessor.
by Paul Goldberger August 25, 2008

Brad Cloepfil’s overhaul keeps the proportions of the old building.

Huntington Hartford’s old Gallery of Modern Art—the white marble bonbon that stood at 2 Columbus Circle from 1964 until a couple of years ago—was a hard building to love but became an even harder one to hate. Excoriated by critics when it went up, then championed by preservationists when it was threatened with destruction, the building provides an object lesson in the inexorable march of architectural fashion and may point to an even more basic truth about people and buildings: we get used to things we don’t like and then come to like things we’ve got used to. The eventual decision to refurbish the building entirely has also provided a young Oregon architect named Brad Cloepfil with a dauntingly controversial commission.

The Gallery of Modern Art, one of several quixotic cultural projects launched by Hartford, an heir to the A. & P. fortune, who died earlier this year at the age of ninety-seven, was originally intended to house his collection of figurative works and to stand as a riposte to what Hartford saw as the reign of abstraction at the Museum of Modern Art. The architect was Edward Durell Stone. Stone had been a leading American exponent of the International Style, but, in the fifties, his new wife, a fashion writer he met on an airplane, encouraged him toward elegance and decoration, and he began to fill his buildings with glitter and marble and screens and gold columns.

As a museum, the Columbus Circle building was a disaster. The galleries, tricked out with expensive wood panelling and brass fixtures, were cramped, and the institution closed after five financially ruinous years. And yet somehow the structure’s dainty columns, tiny portholes, huge arches, and vast windowless expanses of flat, unadorned white marble embedded themselves more deeply into the consciousness of New Yorkers than many better buildings. So what if it looked like a Bauhaus version of the Alhambra—or, as Ada Louise Huxtable, then the architecture critic at the Times, put it, “a die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollypops”? Amid the austere glass boxes of the nineteen-fifties and sixties, it seemed to strike a blow for quirky individualism. Huxtable’s harsh judgment gave rise to a nickname—the Lollipop Building—that was as much affectionate as mocking.

The building eventually wound up in the hands of the city, which, in 1998, decided to sell it to the highest bidder. The city repeatedly refused to have its own Landmarks Preservation Commission consider giving 2 Columbus Circle landmark status, a move that provoked outrage but kept the building salable and more or less sealed its fate. Whether or not the building deserved landmark status depends on what you think a landmark should be: it wasn’t great architecture, but it had unique qualities and some historical importance. In 2002, the city agreed to sell it to the Museum of Arts and Design, formerly the American Crafts Museum. The museum was eager for an architect who had never built in New York before, and hired Cloepfil, whose firm, Allied Works Architecture, in Portland, was just completing its first major project, the sharp and serene Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis. Cloepfil started work on his design while the legal struggle to preserve the building was in progress, but in 2005 the preservationists lost in court, and construction began. The building will open next month.

Cloepfil ended up all but demolishing the original building and creating a new one of exactly the same shape and size, and almost the same color. He kept the gentle curve reflecting the shape of Columbus Circle but changed just about everything else. To let light into the interior, he made long linear incisions, two feet wide, in the façade. These glass channels—Cloepfil has called them “ribbons of light”—make a number of right-angle turns across the façade. In place of Stone’s marble are twenty-two thousand terra-cotta tiles specially made with a slightly iridescent glaze. Depending on the light, they look white or off-white or sparkle with tiny hints of color. Cloepfil told me that the use of ceramic and glass tied the new building to its role as a museum of craft, while its echo of the original marble’s color would suggest continuity with the earlier building. Fair enough. But that dual goal encapsulates the building’s main problem. Cloepfil is trying as hard as he can to be different while trying also to be the same. Rarely has an architect been pulled so completely in opposite directions.

In some respects, he probably didn’t have much choice. He couldn’t make the building taller, because of zoning laws, and he couldn’t make it bigger, because it already filled every inch of its site. And, since museums require mostly solid, windowless walls, he was stuck with those, too. Cloepfil is a sophisticated architect who, at his best, can endow simple geometries with a powerful dignity. His style couldn’t be more different from that of Edward Durell Stone’s late period, which dances on the edge of kitsch, and he has tried to transform Stone’s fussy marble froufrou into something serious and tasteful. Sometimes, as in the long, turning lines of glass, he manages to assert himself firmly enough to keep the old building at bay. At other times, like at the base of the building, where he has kept all but one of Stone’s lollipop-shaped columns and put them behind glass, he seems to have given up altogether and settled for a curatorial role. Ultimately, Cloepfil has been trapped between paying homage to a legendary building and making something of his own. As a result, if you knew the old building, it is nearly impossible to get it out of your mind when you look at the new one. And, if you’ve never seen Columbus Circle before, you probably won’t be satisfied, either: the building’s proportions and composition seem just as odd and awkward as they ever did.

But if you go inside, entering through the glass-enclosed lobby, from which an elegantly detailed staircase of wood and steel leads up to four floors of galleries, it turns out that Cloepfil has done the impossible—making the building’s interior at long last functional, logical, and pleasant to be in. He figured out early on that Stone had made a huge mistake putting the building’s core—its elevators, stairs, and rest rooms—in the center, because that left just a tiny doughnut of usable space around the perimeter. Cloepfil moved two staircases behind the elevators, opening up space on every floor and making decent-sized exhibition galleries possible.

This move also enabled the building to address Columbus Circle more effectively than before. Galleries now have windows looking out over Central Park and, on the ninth floor, there will be a restaurant featuring an entire wall of glass, something the museum insisted on despite Cloepfil’s objections that it would damage the composition of his façade. This might seem a little precious—why shouldn’t the restaurant have a nice, big window?—but Cloepfil was right. The window, running between two vertical glass ribbons, creates a huge “H” on the façade, a pity, because the ribbons are the heart of his design and its most brilliant feature. Once you are inside, you discover that they run not only up and down the façade but also horizontally, into the museum itself: from each vertical window notched into a gallery’s wall, a glass ribbon stretches across the floor and you seem to be walking on thin air. Looking down can be vertiginous at first, but the glass channels allow light to permeate up and down the building, and tie the entire building, inside and out, together in a way that underscores what is new about it. It’s not just that they look different from anything in Stone’s original museum; requiring a completely different structure and engineering, they remind you that this is in almost every way a new building, albeit trapped in the body of an old one, screaming to get out.

[nycstef]

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runnin...orker_revi.php

New Yorker Reviews New 2 Columbus Circle

Posted by Roy Edroso at 5:26 AM, August 18, 2008

In today's New Yorker, Paul Goldberger reviews the new Museum of Arts and Design that will open next month at 2 Columbus Circle. The Museum is a refurbishment of the former Huntington Hartford Gallery of Modern Art -- a controversial building, Goldberger notes, "excoriated by critics when it went up, then championed by preservationists when it was threatened with destruction."

Indeed, when late attempts to landmark the old building failed, the then-New York Cultural Center attracted many nostalgic backward glances. In 2005 Gothamist lamented, "Simply based on how weird and wacky it is, Gothamist would like it to stay as is." And at the New York Sun just this April, James Gardner praised the late building's "smooth, windowless expanse of gleaming white marble," and deplored the new facade as "so mind-numbingly dull as to lack even the posture of ambition."

The old Edward Durell Stone design is not far from Golberger's thoughts, and he suspects it won't be far from yours, either.

"(Architect) Brad Cloepfil ended up all but demolishing the original building and creating a new one of exactly the same shape and size, and almost the same color," writes Goldberger. Contingencies of space, location, and use, he speculates, left Cloepfil "trying as hard as he can to be different while trying also to be the same."

The result: "If you knew the old building, it is nearly impossible to get it out of your mind when you look at the new one. And, if you’ve never seen Columbus Circle before, you probably won’t be satisfied, either..."
Goldberger does like the new interiors, which he says succeed in "opening up space on every floor and making decent-sized exhibition galleries possible."

COMMENTS

wow. They got rid of the lollipop building for that?
What was the gain, exactly? At least the Hartford building was trying to be some kind of a statement. This is a box of fireplace matches from the MoMA gift shop.
Posted by: julia at August 18, 2008 7:40 AM

[CoolCzech]

This vandalization of an Edward Durell Stone building is really just so sad. If it was a redesign to a high quality new design, that would be one thing. But this...

[ablarc]

The Landmarks Commission should compile a short list of architectural auteurs, architects of such importance to the culture that their works should be automatically preserved. A representative list would feature Frank Lloyd Wright (yes, including the Mercedes-Benz showroom!), Eero Saarinen, Cass Gilbert, Philip Johnson, Charles McKim, Alexander Jackson Davis, Richard Upjohn, Philip Johnson, Raymond Hood, Richard Morris Hunt, Minoru Yamasaki and yes, Edward Durrell Stone.

All on the above list are dead, so there will be no more of their works produced. Maybe being dead should be a requirement for inclusion.

[CoolCzech]

I think the list should also include Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Charles Bulfinch, and Thomas U. Walter. And don't forget Louis Sullivan...

[Stroika]

^^ I accept that suggestion only with the added corollary that other architects be highlighted whose work should be destroyed as quickly as possible. Gene Kaufman would be the group's charter member.

[ablarc]

Originally Posted by CoolCzech

I think the list should also include Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Charles Bulfinch, and Thomas U. Walter. And don't forget Louis Sullivan...

Mine was a list for New York --and Sullivan should of course be on it, since he has a building in New York. Do the others also have New York buildings?

[spatulashack]

Maybe its just me but I don't mind the new design. It's not great by any means but I think people remember the old POS a little too fondly. Yes it was pretty interesting but it was still a hideous hulking mass. This new design at least adds some whimsy. I think it's that nagging, "you don't know what you got till its gone," that hits everyone even if what you had wasn't all that great to begin with. It reminds me of how I hated the WTC towers (rightly so, they were gross examples of architecture) but as soon as they fell I complained that they were gone. In the end though, just because they fell in an attack doesn't change the fact that the towers were beasts on our skyline. I just got used to them being there.