[NYguy]

http://www.archdaily.com/474847/opin...content=474847

OPINION: DS+R Should Have Resigned from the MoMA Commission

With all the controversy surrounding Diller Scofidio +Renfro (DSR) and MoMA’s decision to demolish the American Folk Art Museum to make way for expansion, DS+R has increasingly come under fire (indeed, even DS+R’s democratizing move to make the MoMA’s sculpture garden accessible to the public has provoked considerable ire). In the following article, which originally appeared on Metropolis as “Damage Control,” critic and author Martin Pedersen questions: why didn’t DS+R just walk away?....

Given the outrage surrounding the decision and MoMA’s damaged credibility as a cultural institution, it’s hard to see how this won’t inflict real harm on the architects’ reputations. The whole sorry episode has been extremely damaging to the DSR brand, which was once arty, innovative and culturally hip. It’s what now, exactly?

http://www.artsjournal.com/culturegr...expansion.html

Gladiator in the Architects’ Den: Elizabeth Diller’s Bravura Performance on MoMA’s Expansion

January 29, 2014
by CultureGrrl

She probably didn’t change the hearts and minds of the many in the architectural community who adamantly oppose the Museum of Modern Art’s (to my mind justifiable) decision to knock down the 12-year-old American Folk Art Museum in connection with its next expansion.

But Elizabeth Diller walked away from last night’s presentation and panel discussion on the expansion (sponsored by two of her critics—the Architectural League and the Municipal Art Society of New York, as well as the American Institute of Architects New York Chapter) with a long round of strong applause ringing in her ears.

Her intelligent, poised presentation (with numerous slides of conceptual renderings and floorplans) detailed the results of her firm’s failed attempts to find a design solution that would “serve the museum’s mission and curatorial goals” while preserving the Tod Williams Billie Tsien-designed American Folk Art Museum. (Those architects were notable by their absence.) “We were unable to find an adaptive reuse solution,” Diller said.

During the question-and-answer period, Glenn Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art, stated flatly that, notwithstanding pleas by some that the knockdown be delayed and reconsidered, “we’ve worked through a lot of options and we’ve made our decision” [emphasis added].

( It was more suitable to the article )




http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/13/ny...e-on.html?_r=0

Folk Art Building Will Be Demolished, but Its Facade Will Live On

FEB. 12, 2014

Contrary to what you may have read lately, the Museum of Modern Art is intent on carefully preserving the former American Folk Art Museum next door.

At least, the part of it that is most recognizable to the public: an 82-foot-high sculptural ensemble of 63 panels, cast in a gorgeous copper-bronze alloy, each panel different from those around it. Some look like lunar landscapes, others like lava flows. They are arrayed in three planes that fold into one another as a palm would crease when closing.

We will take the facade down, piece by piece, and we will store it,” Glenn D. Lowry, the director of the Museum of Modern Art, said in an interview last week. “We have made no decision about what happens subsequently, other than the fact that we’ll have it and it will be preserved.”

Alberto Cavallero, a principal in Diller Scofidio, said the facade was “very amenable to disassembly” since the panels, three-eighths of an inch thick, are hung on a supporting armature. They will be wrapped for storage, he said.

“It would be a kinder fate for the museum facade to be at Storm King, as the front of an imaginary building in an enclosure of fresh air, than to be buried in storage for the foreseeable future,” said Darcy Miro, the artist who collaborated on the facade with Mr. Williams and Ms. Tsien. The Storm King Art Center is in the Hudson Valley. The panels were cast at the Tallix fine-arts foundry in Beacon, N.Y.

“It would be a mistake to just use it as adornment,” Ms. Miro said. “Maybe, as metal, it was always meant to go back to the land and leave the city.”

Maybe they should just put the thing on display in the museum, and shut the critics up.