2 Columbus Circle Renovation

[New Jack City]

This is some old news but in case anyone didn't see it, here is the renderings of the 2 Columbus Circle renovation.


http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2003/04/01/arts/colu2.184.jpg

Two Columbus Circle as it is.

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2003/04/01/arts/colu1.184.jpg

Two Columbus Circle as it might be.

[AtlanticaC5]

Hehe, yeah I remember this cute little building. What's the usage of the building?

[Philip Cronin]

Perhaps it would be better to demolish it than to make it that ugly.

[New Jack City]

They changed the renovation design to something else...

NY Times

January 22, 2004

On Columbus Circle, Fighting a Face-Lift

By JULIE V. IOVINE

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/01/22/garden/22circle.184.jpg
NOW AND WHEN The 1964 facade at 2 Columbus Circle, left, and the proposed makeover, right.

THIS much will always be true: The view from the top floor of 2 Columbus Circle is stunning.

You can see the mighty vectors of Broadway and Central Park West radiating north and Central Park carpeting the landscape to the east. Hard to the west, the new Time Warner Center rises skyward.

The prospect from the top floor of 2 Columbus Circle may be clear as far as the eye can see, but the building's future is still murky. Last month, the Museum of Arts and Design approved a design by Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture for a complete overhaul of the 40-year-old building, designed by Edward Durell Stone. The museum, formerly the American Craft Museum, is in the process of buying the building, vacant since 1998, from the city.

That transaction, and the subsequent renovation, is threatened by a lawsuit filed in November by a consortium of three preservation groups, arguing that the building's historic value was inadequately analyzed by the city before it agreed to turn the building over for private development. The case will go before a judge of the New York County Supreme Court on Feb. 20.

The controversy has made for some unlikely bunkmates, with critics known for championing more new avant-garde architecture joining neighborhood groups known for opposing new development.

The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission is not going to protect the building, having declined to submit it for consideration in 1996, two years after it became eligible for landmark status.

Theodore Prudon, the president of Docomomo, a preservation group dedicated to saving modern structures and one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said: "The building has very many detractors and supporters. With that much interest, clearly it is a building of significance that should be considered a New York landmark. Independent of whether the current design is good or bad, these prior issues need to be settled."

Others feel that the building, not considered one of Stone's most significant, has had its day in court. "It's a building of no consequence whatsoever," said Terence Riley, chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art. "To deserve landmark status, something either has to have happened there or it has to be a place of great architectural distinction. It's not enough to say it's quirky and interesting."

On Tuesday, the Committee for Environmentally Sound Development, a neighborhood group, published an open letter to Robert B. Tierney, chairman of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, in AM New York, a free daily newspaper. The letter asks the commission to reconsider awarding the building landmark status for its "novel and daring style" and radical departure from the established corporate architecture of its day. In a phone interview, Mr. Tierney said that the commission was mindful of the "robust debate" about 2 Columbus Circle, but would not reconsider. "In the past year, we've seen it talked about, we've seen a lot in print and we've thought about it and the decision made in 1996 is the decision that stands," he said.

The museum was a critical lightning rod from the very start. Huntington Hartford's Gallery of Modern Art, as it was originally known, was built in 1964 to house his personal art collection. Its perforated ornamental flourishes invoked either Venice or acoustical tiles, depending on your viewpoint. The interiors were widely acknowledged to be too small, dark and claustrophobic, and Mr. Hartford closed his museum after just five years. Over the next 30 years, it was a temporary home to the New York Cultural Center and after the city acquired it in 1975, it housed the Cultural Affairs Department, but failed to find a permanent resident. By 1998, it was empty.

In 2002 the city agreed to sell the building to the Museum of Arts and Design, which is squeezed into three and a half levels at 40 West 53rd Street. "It's ridiculously small," said Holly Hotchner, the director. "There's no room for showing the collection, no room for public programs, no visitors' services. There's not even room to sit down." After the city agreed to the sale, the museum held a competition to choose an architect for the building's conversion. The contest, which included submissions by Zaha Hadid, Toshiko Mori, and Smith-Miller & Hawkinson Architects, led to the selection of Mr. Cloepfil, a 47-year-old architect from Portland, Ore., who recently completed the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis.

Renderings released to the public last week by the museum show the building, with its small-bore windows and elongated loggia at the top, now etched with a channel of glass tracking up a terra-cotta facade. "I want it to maintain a sense of silence and singularity," Mr. Cloepfil said, "to emphasize its role as a marker on Columbus Circle in juxtaposition to all the noise around it."

Some elements of the old building will be preserved in its new form. Its original 10-story height, the concave curve of the facade and the arcade of "Venetian lollipop" columns, as the critic Ada Louise Huxtable dismissively called them when it opened, will all remain. The exterior cladding, however, will be entirely removed, replaced by glazed terra-cotta tiles with an iridescent sheen. "I want the facade to have a character and a texture so that it shows its materiality more, the closer you get to it, like an object you go to pick up on a shelf," Mr. Cloepfil said.

The distinguishing feature of the lobby will be switchback stairs that wrap around a glass display. Both stairwell and staircase will rise to the fifth floor, taking natural light from the lobby with them. The lack of windows in a prime city location has always dismayed the building's critics, but because the original structure is a concrete box, instead of a steel frame, the walls themselves hold up the building, and only about 30 percent of the concrete could be incised. Bringing in light without endangering the structure was Mr. Cloepfil's chief challenge. His solution is a 30-inch-wide channel of glass that runs up the facade and continues inside, cutting across floors, ceilings and walls. The most glass, both transparent and fritted, will be found on the upper floors, where offices and a cafe are to be located. The channel motif, Mr. Cloepfil said, "had to fill the galleries with light, connect people to the views and render the entire building more transparent to the city."

The design more than doubles the building's original gallery space on the four floors above the lobby by relocating the fire stair and restrooms, and by modernizing the mechanical systems. The sixth and seventh floors will be dedicated to artists' studios, classrooms and event spaces.

The dilapidated building still has some ornate interior finishes, including parquet floors, walnut paneling and bronze balustrades decorated with a whimsical bubble motif. Mr. Cloepfil said that it would be too costly to preserve most of the interior detailing, except for a basement auditorium with oversize bronze doors, which will be completely restored. The construction budget, Ms. Hotchner said, is under $30 million.

Construction was to begin in April, Ms. Hotchner said, but plans are on hold, pending the outcome of the lawsuit.

Meanwhile, architects continue to take sides. Unimpressed by the building's long and checkered past, Lindy Roy, a young architect from South Africa who set up a design office in Manhattan in 2000, said she's an admirer of the building just as it is: "I love it for all its craziness. It's so unapologetic. Any windowless structure in the city is compelling." But compelling toward what remains the question.

[phxmania2001]

Originally posted by savethewtc
http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/01/22/garden/22circle.184.jpg
NOW AND WHEN The 1964 facade at 2 Columbus Circle, left, and the proposed makeover, right.

Meh... I'm not too keen on what's there now, but this rendering looks like some sort of futuristic soda machine. :cheers:

[New Jack City]

Originally posted by phxmania2001

Meh... I'm not too keen on what's there now, but this rendering looks like some sort of futuristic soda machine. :cheers:

lol - I thought it looked like some sort of nuclear fallout shelter! :D

[GreatSky]

I support demolishing it. Why not just start fresh?

[New Jack City]

Chicago Tribune

Landmark can be remodeled, court rules

Associated Press
Published April 25, 2004

NEW YORK -- A nearly windowless, 10-story building erected in the 1960s that is considered a landmark by some and a monstrosity by others can be given a makeover, a judge ruled.

The Museum of Arts and Design can move ahead with its plan to purchase and renovate 2 Columbus Circle, State Supreme Court Justice Walter Tolub said earlier this month, turning aside an effort by three preservationist groups. The building, across from the southwest corner of Central Park, is now owned by the city and has been vacant since 1998.

The groups argued that the city had not thoroughly assessed the impact of selling and renovating the building when it said the structure was "not worthy of preservation in its present form." But Tolub said the city had taken "a hard look" at the issue.

The building, designed in 1964 by noted architect Edward Durell Stone, is windowless except for a row of elongated windows along the top and features a concave facade and engraved porthole edges.

The unorthodox design has been derided by many critics, but it was famously championed by author Tom Wolfe.

"Stone was the most prominent architect in America, and he decided that the modernist movement in architecture -- in other words, the parade of glass boxes that marched across America -- had become exhausted, not worth pursuing anymore," Wolfe once said. "He did this as a way of saying, `Enough is enough.'"

The Museum of Arts and Design, formerly the American Craft Museum, plans to replace the facade with terra cotta and glass and make changes to the layout of the interior. There also will be more windows.

The building originally housed the art collection of millionaire A&P heir Huntington Hartford.

[BigMac]

National Trust for Historic Preservation
May 24, 2004

2 Columbus Circle one of America's 11 Most Endangered Historic Places

Created by architect Edward Durell Stone, who also designed Washington’s famed Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, 2 Columbus Circle is a nationally recognized – albeit controversial – icon of the Modern Movement. Sporting a marble skin, porthole windows and a street-level arcade that critics have likened to a row of lollipops, the unorthodox building is radically different from the glass-and-steel boxes typical of its era.

Now it is slated to be sold and renovated as a permanent home for the Museum of Arts and Design. That’s the good news; the bad news is that the design proposed for the new use would strip 2 Columbus Circle of its architectural integrity, and since it is not protected by New York’s preservation ordinance, these changes could be made without any kind of preservation review. This means that unless the new owner can be persuaded of the building’s significance, sweeping architectural changes could rob 2 Columbus Circle of its distinctive character and rob America of an engagingly quirky icon of the recent past.

History

Located at the southwest corner of Central Park, 2 Columbus Circle has been controversial ever since its completion in 1964. Originally designed to showcase the modern-art collection of supermarket heir Huntington Hartford, the building housed New York City offices during the 1980s and 1990s but is now vacant, pending transfer to the private Museum of Arts and Design. The building was listed on the Preservation League of New York State’s “Seven to Save” this year in recognition of its architectural and historical significance to the citizens of New York.

Threat

The new design for the building by Brad Cloepfil, although not finalized, includes extensive alterations that would destroy major elements of Edward Durell Stone’s design. The destruction of 2 Columbus Circle's original façade would mean the loss of a unique chapter of America's story.

Solution

The National Trust urges the owners of 2 Columbus Circle, currently the City of New York, but soon to be the Museum of Arts and Design, to develop a restoration plan for the building that respects its integrity as a modernist masterpiece and celebrates its unique form and design. Listing in the State and National Registers of Historic Places and public hearings by the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission for landmark designation of 2 Columbus Circle will give the building added protection and ensure that all possible measures are taken to protect this important resource.

http://www.nationaltrust.org/11most/2004/images/popup1_2_columbus.jpg
Circa 1964.

http://www.nationaltrust.org/11most/2004/images/popup2_2_columbus.jpg
This view (circa 1964) taken soon after the opening of Huntington Hartford's Gallery of Modern Art, shows the 1892 Columbus Monument at left.

http://www.nationaltrust.org/11most/2004/images/popup3_2_columbus.jpg
View of "Lollipop Arcade," circa 1964.

http://www.nationaltrust.org/11most/2004/images/popup4_2_columbus.jpg
View of interior gallery, circa 1964.

http://www.nationaltrust.org/11most/2004/images/popup5_2_columbus.jpg
View of interior auditorium, circa 1964.

http://www.nationaltrust.org/11most/2004/images/popup6_2_columbus.jpg
Recent view from north side of Columbus Circle (2002).

Copyright 2004 National Trust for Historic Preservation

[New Jack City]

The solution sounds good.

On one side I respect and admire the tower's uniqueness and stand out attitude not giving a shit about what you think of it, but it's different seeing it and through pictures here.

It looked filthy and dirty when I saw it up close, one thing's for sure, something's gotta be done.

[RafflesCity]

They should just clean it up cos its design is unique.

[7 World Trade]

i agree with raffles city. it's such an unique architecture, and it's perfect for a design of a museum of arts and design, and it design was meant for a museum. but they can reclad the wall to make it look less dull.

the facade of the new plan looks like something they'd put on a telephone switching center in nyc.

:puke:

[New Jack City]

Here's a picture I took of it with the Columbus statue:

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/photopost/data/500/24042004_0430Image0021.JPG

[BigMac]

Here's a picture I took of it with the Columbus statue:

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/photopost/data/500/24042004_0430Image0021.JPGNice picture! :)

I'm also looking forward to the renovation of Columbus Circle itself.
Here is more information from landscape architecture firm Olin Partnership (http://www.olinptr.com/project_current_urban2.html):

http://www.olinptr.com/images/project_image_columbuscircle1.gif

The design intent for Columbus Circle returns the historic monument to public access and appreciation, fostering an environment not present for a generation. The proposed design has been conceived to make the site a safe and attractive addition to the public realm of New York City at one of the principal entries to Central Park and the intersection of three significant streets: Broadway, Eight Avenue and 59th Street. The design features – paving, planting, fountains, seating and lighting – all reinforce the simple idea that Columbus Circle is unique in the City.

The island consists of a series of concentric rings that buffer the traffic and provide a pleasant pedestrian environment for the monument, consisting of a broad, gently raised area of planting, a series of fountains, paving, benches and lights. On the outer perimeter, a ring of raised stone cobbles provides an emerging pedestrian refuge adjacent to the outer vehicular lane, which, in winter, can also accept piles of snow and salt without damage to planting. Next, a ring of colorful low plantings is formed, which can be changed and replenished seasonally. This is encircled by evergreen shrubs, placed to enhance the floral display, and a ring of trees standing in evergreen groundcovers, underplanted with spring bulbs.

Proposed American Yellow Buckeye frame axial views to the historic monument, while providing a partial enclosure in the form of a circular room, in the center of which stands the monument. New benches, scaled to complement the civic space, are to be made of curved wood, designed to be large enough to allow individuals and groups to sit comfortably back to back, facing either the active water and planting or the monument.

The small fountain currently surrounding the monument base is to be removed, allowing the column base to sit firmly on the ground as the central feature of the circle. People will once more be able to approach the monument, to read the inscriptions, and to study the relief sculptures on the base more easily than in recent decades. To replace the loss of the central fountain, new basins are to be created that encircle the central open area. More generous than the former basin and shaped as a series of concentric ledges to form cascades with arching jets towards the center, the new fountains will reinforce the circular design and primacy of the monument, while masking the noise of the traffic and tempering the climate in summer. The fountain is designed to form a series of bleacher seats which, when turned off, avoid the forlorn character of so many empty fountain bases in the City, visible during the colder months.

It is the intent of these simple gestures to make obvious the importance of this civic space and monument, and to return it to the citizens and visitors of New York City as an inviting celebratory place. It is a place to pause and refresh oneself in the midst of one of the busiest intersections in the metropolis – a foyer to Central Park, an event on Broadway, and a handsome scene for those who live, work and visit this great city.

http://www.metropolismag.com/images/images_0404/ob/ColumbusCircle3.jpg
(Metropolis Magazine)

http://www.metropolismag.com/images/images_0404/ob/ColumbusCircle2.jpg
(Metropolis Magazine)

[New Jack City]

Thanks!

The whole renovation is gonna look great and definetely help the area, is there any date when construction will be done?

The redesign of 2 Columbus Circle isn't anything special, probably average at best which is probably the biggest reason for the opposition and controversy. Maybe if they proposed a design just nearly as original as the current one, I think there would be more support.

Here's another rendering of the proposed renovation:

http://www.alliedworks.com/iv/shots/b.jpg

[BigMac]

is there any date when construction will be done?

According to a New York Post article from February 24:

"The city's Department of Design and Construction says the $20 million reconstruction of the traffic circle and its center island is on schedule, due to be finished by year's end. Only the planting of perennials must wait until spring. When the job is done, the island that's home to the Christopher Columbus statue will be graced by pretty landscaping and three graceful fountains."

[New Jack City]

NY Daily News

2 Columbus Circle deal gets okay

http://www.nydailynews.com/ips_rich_content/495-2columbuscircle.JPG
The building was nicknamed lollipop because of its columns.

BY LORE CROGHAN and DANIEL DUNAIEF
DAILY NEWS BUSINESS WRITERS

The lollipop building, which has graced Columbus Circle for decades, won final approval yesterday to be sold.

Manhattan's borough board gave its okay for the transaction in a 9-to-1 vote, despite appeals by preservationists.

The Museum of Arts & Design is paying $17 million for the famous building, which got its nickname from its lollipop-shaped columns. The museum plans to tear down the building's white-marble facade, which has riled some groups.

"There was a lot of discussion and debate surrounding the landmarkable status," said Josh Bosian, the director of community affairs for city Councilwoman Gale Brewer, who voted to approve the sale.

The Museum said the sale would make the building a more productive cultural center.

"This gives the opportunity for the museum to continue to grow," said Laurie Beckelman, head of the museum's new building program. "We'll have public spaces and artists creating art, master classes, and a beautiful theater in the basement. It's a great thing for the city."

Landmark West, however, had a vastly different reaction to yesterday's vote, which is the final government action required before the sale can take place.

"We were hoping to see leadership from the board," said Kate Wood, executive director of Landmark West. "We are extremely disappointed it didn't come through."

Wood said the group, which collected over 1,000 signatures, will continue to press a lawsuit.

"What we've been asking for is a public hearing for the Landmark's Preservation Commission," Wood said.

Manhattan councilman Bill Perkins was the lone vote against the sale.

"This is a precious piece of property," he said. "I thought it was important that we take a position that respected the architectural and historical significance."

Originally published on August 25, 2004

[Ellatur]

finally... it looked very ugly to me

[3tmk]

and very very ugly to me

[FerrariEnzo]

THANK GOD. I hate looking at that THING.

[giergel]

I like it! It looks cute and the inside is also very nice!

[New Jack City]

Even though it looks ugly the way it is now, it is controversial and has an identity, this new renovated design just looks too ordinary and bland. I'm kinda undecided on what should happen, on one hand it's not pleasant to look at in it's current state and the renovation would make it more functional but it's different and most great buildings have controversy architecturally.

Anyway, here's an article...

NY Times

Taming the Beast From 1965

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2004/10/04/arts/04ouro.jpg
A rendering of 2 Columbus Circle.

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
Published: October 4, 2004

Whatever you think of 2 Columbus Circle, that odd marble curiosity designed by Edward Durell Stone to house a supermarket heir's art collection, it certainly incites passion. The building, which is expected to undergo a drastic recladding and renovation and become the new home of the Museum of Arts and Design, has been the focus of one of the most volatile preservation battles in recent memory.

Now, in an effort to drum up support for its plans, the museum has invited a handpicked audience of civic leaders and news media organizations to view some minor revisions to its architectural design. Clearly it hopes that the event will turn attention to the future, sweeping preservationists' objections aside.

The design, by Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture, has been altered to improve circulation and create more space for the galleries. The architect has also contrived to play up the contrast between past and present: the new design would give passers-by a chance to glimpse the building's famous old lollipop-shaped columns through sections of translucent glass on the ground floor.

But these are minor changes. The building's original white marble cladding and porthole windows would be eliminated - and its essential character would be lost.

You can make a convincing argument that there is not much worth saving here. By any standard, Stone's building is awkward. Its facade is a garish interpretation of Venetian palazzos; its interiors, which include a warren of staircases, are cramped and confused.

But the building's importance has less to do with its design than with the role it has played in New York's architectural landscape. Stone was a major figure in American architecture, and his Columbus Circle building, completed in 1965, is among a handful of works that represent a turning point in his career, when he rejected some of the tenets of late Modernism in favor of a more overt historicism. For us, it is a reminder that Modernism did not always follow a straight, unbroken path.

More critically, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission continues to refuse to hold a public hearing to determine the building's historic importance. Could that be because the Bloomberg administration, which has offered the museum a $2 million incentive if it completes the project by 2007, sees it as a major feature of its plans for redeveloping Columbus Circle?

It seems that private interests are once again being favored above the broader public realm. Stone's design, and the people of this city, deserve more respect than this.

The strength of Stone's building, in fact, stems from its spirit of aggression. The building's concave facade essentially turns its back on Columbus Circle. Its galleries, clad in a dark walnut veneer and pierced by small portholes at the corners, conjure the musty atmosphere of a private men's club. That aggression was not by accident. Conceived a few years after the completion of Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building, the design was meant as a counterattack against the stripped-down functionalism of much postwar American architecture.

Rather than play up these tensions, Cloepfil's design glosses over them. The only major concession to the building's history occurs on the ground floor. (In the earlier version of the design, the lollipop-shaped columns were hidden behind opaque glass on both sides, so that they were virtually invisible.) In the new version, the upper section of the glass facade is translucent, so that the silhouettes of the columns' circular tops would be visible from the street.

Inside the lobby, the glass barrier has been removed so that the columns are completely exposed. But the result seems more like an effort to appease the project's opponents than a sincere attempt to come to terms with the building's history.

The rest of the facade is wrapped inside a new skin of terra-cotta panels. A series of narrow slots cut up and across the building's facade as they rise, creating a geometric pattern of incisions that allow light to flow into the building.

The incisions evoke the rough openings that the artist Gordon Matta-Clark carved through abandoned buildings in New York in the 1970's. But Cloepfil's design is far more polite than Matta-Clark's work. The incisions are covered in translucent glass that is flush with the building's facade, so that the violence of the cuts is completely lost.

The result looks timid. Seen from across Columbus Circle, it would fit nicely with the sanitized vision of the Time Warner Center next door.

Cloepfil's design is far more persuasive when you reach the galleries. Visitors would enter them from an elegant steel staircase that rises from a corner of the lobby. They would then continue up through the galleries along a series of switchback stairs tucked behind the elevator core. By creating a more compact circulation system, Cloepfil is able to squeeze in roughly 3,000 square feet of additional gallery space.

The cuts, too, seem more effective inside. On one of the gallery floors, for example, a single two-foot-wide incision cuts across the ceiling to create a narrow clerestory window just below the ceiling. From here the incision turns vertically downward to offer a narrow view of the city outside before turning once again and cutting across the floor so that visitors would get a fragmented view of others passing underneath.

But the same effect could probably have been achieved without stripping away so much of the building's identity. And the stronger contrast between new and old may have enlivened the design.

The point, in any case, is that these issues have not been fully explored by the city or the architect. The entire debate has been reduced to a question of simple tastes.

The real aim of this design is to cleanse the site of uncomfortable historical memories and thereby make it more palatable for powerful real estate interests. And this is a dangerous sign for the future.

[LeCom]

The building is ugly but it defines Columbus Circle. Hands off the landmark.

[FerrariEnzo]

You know what, just tear it down and reconstruct it in...queens. Start a new one from scratch.

[New Jack City]

NY POST

SALE OF 'LOLLIPOP' BUILDING GETS OK

By DAREH GREGORIAN and STEVE CUOZZO

February 25, 2005 -- Fans of the "lollipop building" have been licked again — an appeals court has given the green light for the sale and redesign of the controversial Columbus Circle structure.

In a unanimous decision, the state Appellate Division found the city followed proper procedures in its bid to sell the almost completely windowless building to the Museum of Arts & Design, which plans to refurbish and renovate it.

Preservationist group Landmark West! and others had sued to stop the sale, arguing the city gave short shrift to its stance that the vacant nine-story structure with lollipop-like columns is "a historic resource" that should be preserved.

The Appellate Division, however, agreed with Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Walter Tolub's ruling last year that found that the city "took the required hard look at the relevant areas of environmental concern and made a reasoned elaboration of its findings."

Jerome Chazen, the chairman of the museum's capital campaign who has donated $12 million to the project, said, "We're very pleased and especially pleased that the Appellate Division handed down a 5-0 decision.

"We're finalizing our contract with the city. Our understanding is that the city is ready to go. As fast as we sign, we're going to work."

Once the museum buys the property for $17 million, a redesign by architect Brad Clopefil will replace the mostly window-less marble facade with terra cotta and glass.

Landmark West! suffered another blow yesterday when another judge, Harold Beeler, dismissed a second suit that contended a Manhattan Borough Board meeting where the sale of 2 Columbus Circle was approved should be voided because there wasn't enough public notice. Beeler said reps from Landmark West! were at the meeting, so they can't complain they didn't know about it.

Two Columbus Circle was commissioned by A&P supermarket heir Huntington Hartford to be an art gallery and designed by renowned architect Edward Durrell Stone. It became a city visitor center in 1980 but has been empty and crumbling since the mid-1990s.

[giergel]

How high is it actually?

[LeCom]

Original: pretty ugly at times, but original and now a definite NYC landmar.
New: What the hell is it supposed to look like?!

[Ellatur]

i'd rather tear down the whole facade and cover it up with the same glass material as TWC

[TalB]

http://www.ny1.com/ny1/content/index.jsp?&aid=51232&search_result=1&stid=8
Architecture Lovers Rally To Save 2 Columbus Circle

http://www.ny1.com/ny1/content/images/live/82/163373.jpg

May 31, 2005

Some Manhattan architecture lovers rallied Tuesday to try to save one of Columbus Circle's most distinctive buildings. NY1’s Tanya Valle filed this report.

To some New Yorkers it's an eyesore. To others, 2 Columbus Circle is a work of art that shouldn't be destroyed.

"It’s part of the whole development of modern architecture, and our modern being as modern citizens, so you can’t sort of say, ‘Well, all of these things have got to be demolished,’” says professor and architect Francoise Bollack. “It’s very important to keep these things around."

Bollack was one of the demonstrators outside the Museum of Arts and Design on Tuesday. The museum bought Edward Durrell Stone's 1964 building for $17 million as its future home, and is planning a $30 million reconstruction.

When the project is complete, 2 Columbus Circle will have windows, and a new façade made of 40 percent glass.

“The museum is doing a wonderful service to the people of New York by taking a derelict building which has been empty for eight years and putting a substantial amount of investment into the museum, of money, time, effort to beautify this part of New York, and to bring community and cultural services," says Holly Hotchner, the Director of the Museum of Arts and Design.

The demonstrators disagree. They say the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission should hold public hearings to consider designating the building a landmark.

“All we're really asking for here is a chance for everyone to sort of talk about the preservation issues at large, to really examine this and speak for a building which is obviously significant,” says Simeon Bankoff of the Historic District Council.

But the Landmarks Preservation Commission is sticking to a decision in made in 1996, that the building doesn't merit a public hearing.

“A large majority of the people who make architectural decisions in this city have deemed our plan excellent, including the mayor, and [the Office of] City Planning, and the borough president, and the community board, and those are the bodies of people who make decisions in New York,” says Hotchner.

- Tanya Valle

[Phoenix Ashes]

I can't think of anything Stone has done that I like, and the Columbus Circle building really creeps me out. Still, something tells me to keep it the way it is, if only to remind us how bad some architecture can be, or maybe because it defines an era so well.

The building I hate the most in NYC is the old Pan Am Building. Taking that monstrosity down is probably never going to happen. As eyesores go, it's far worse than the Huntington Hartford.

[TalB]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/29/opinion/29wed3.html
The Case of 2 Columbus Circle

Published: June 29, 2005

So far, Edward Durell Stone is not having a good century. Two years ago, the extraordinary house he built for A. Conger Goodyear in Old Westbury, N.Y., was nearly torn down. Early this month, the board of trustees at the University of Arkansas approved the razing of an apartment complex designed by Stone, an Arkansas native who died in 1978. But the real insult has come from New York City, and specifically from the Landmarks Preservation Commission, which has refused to hold hearings to discuss the fate of Stone's controversial building at 2 Columbus Circle.

The Museum of Arts and Design, formerly the American Craft Museum, has purchased the building and plans to strip away its marble facade, replacing it with a neutral, not to say impersonal, sheath designed by Brad Cloepfil. The redesign enjoys the support of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who was a member of the museum's board of trustees and who appointed the head of the landmarks commission, Robert Tierney.

It's one thing to doom this building - for that is what this redesign means - after a hearing by the landmarks commission. No one expects that a proper hearing would automatically lead to a vote for preserving Stone's original design. This, after all, is the building that famously evoked from The Times's great architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable the word "lollipop," a word that has stuck to this building like a wet sucker to a flannel blanket.

Stone's design - its Islamic overtones, its gleaming white marble in a dark setting - has been controversial from the start, and the controversy has been amplified by the checkered history of the building, which was built as a museum but has served as the headquarters of the city's Cultural Affairs Department and now stands vacant.

Yet dooming this building without a hearing is an enormous mistake, one that seriously erodes the Landmarks Preservation Commission's purpose and whatever political independence it has managed to attain since it was first created. It's hard to say, in fact, whether the commission has refused to hear this case as a matter of taste or a matter of politics. If it is a matter of politics, then the commission is headed down the wrong road entirely. But if it is a matter of taste - a sense that this building is too ugly to live and has somehow never fit its setting - then the commission is still headed down the wrong road. Its purpose is to weigh openly questions of taste against questions of historical merit, not to impose, by a fiat of neglect, its own unexpressed will.

The building at 2 Columbus Circle is already an architectural monument, the work of a major architect, whether the commission likes it or not. The National Trust for Historic Preservation and the World Monuments Fund have declared this building one of the nation's most endangered structures, but the city has done nothing to protect it.

The real question here is, of course, the character of the New York we live in. Some buildings, some neighborhoods, have a completeness, a consistency, about them that is easy to justify, historically and aesthetically. They help confirm our notion of urban coherence. But this is not an entirely coherent city, certainly not architecturally. Stone created at least two grand irruptions in the familiar pattern: 2 Columbus Circle and his house at 130 East 64th Street, which was protected by the landmarks commission when Stone's widow tried to tear down its facade - a striking white concrete grille in a row of conventional town houses. The point of preservation, as the landmarks commission once understood, is to protect the complexity of the past, not to iron it out.

[7 World Trade]

they should at least preserve all the lollipops at the base. do with the rest of the building as u like, but leave those lollipops alone!

[BigMac]

New York Times
August 9, 2005

Unanimity on a Building Is a Facade, Insiders Say

By DAVID W. DUNLAP

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/08/09/nyregion/circle.184.jpg
The building at 2 Columbus Circle, where a renovation is planned that would change its distinctive look. It has been denied landmark status.

The debate over whether 2 Columbus Circle merits consideration as an official landmark is playing out on the Landmarks Preservation Commission itself, despite City Hall's insistence that the case against the building was closed nine years ago.

The administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg favors a major alteration that would transform 2 Columbus Circle into the Museum of Arts and Design. It has relied on a 1996 decision by the landmarks commission's designation committee that the marble-clad, porthole-edged, concave building - designed by Edward Durell Stone as Huntington Hartford's Gallery of Modern Art - did not warrant a public hearing.

But on Saturday, Roberta Brandes Gratz, one of seven members who have joined the commission since the 1996 decision, said in a letter to The New York Times, "Neither I as an individual commissioner nor the current commission as a whole has rendered a 'professional judgment' on whether there should be a hearing or a designation."

Her letter suggested that at least some of the 11 commissioners favor a public hearing, as did telephone interviews yesterday with several members.

"It's very encouraging from our perspective - a sign of life," said Kate Wood, the executive director of Landmark West, a preservation group that has been battling to save 2 Columbus Circle. The letter, she said, "gives us some hope that it's not a closed case."

However, the current chairman, Robert B. Tierney, has already said he will not seek to change the 1996 decision. And yesterday, the executive director, Ronda Wist, said Mr. Tierney "is not inclined to revisit this question."

On July 30, in an Op-Ed article in The Times, Sherida E. Paulsen, a former commission chairwoman, said 2 Columbus Circle "is of little consequence historically or culturally" and "so unlikely to qualify for landmark status" that the "commission determined that it did not merit a public hearing." This, she wrote, was "the professional judgment of the 19 people" who have served on the commission since 1996.

Ms. Gratz's letter came in response to Ms. Paulsen's assertion, as did a letter in The Times from Beverly Moss Spatt, another former commission chairwoman, who asked, "If such overwhelming consensus is indeed the case, where is the public record of this decision?"

A Buildings Department permit was issued in June to allow removal of the existing facade for the Museum of Arts and Design project. However, in a court case in which the sale of the building by New York City to the museum has been challenged by Landmark West, the city's Law Department said last month that it would not close on the sale of 2 Columbus Circle or authorize work under the existing permits until Sept. 7.

Though the 41-year-old building was once widely derided, preservationists argue that Mr. Stone was a major architect and that evolving tastes permit a better appreciation of his romantic style of Modernism. In any case, they say, the building's fate should not be decided by a committee but by the full commission in a formal vote, after public testimony.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

[BigMac]

New York Times
August 18, 2005

For 2 Columbus Circle, a Growing Fan Club

By DAVID W. DUNLAP

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/08/18/nyregion/17blocks_lg.jpg
The Landmarks Preservation Commission has refused to hold a public hearing on 2 Columbus Circle, right.

THE Landmarks Preservation Commission seems to have painted itself into a corner over 2 Columbus Circle.

Its refusal to hold a public hearing on whether 2 Columbus Circle merits landmark status - to receive testimony pro and con, to debate the matter openly, to reach a decision with a vote recorded next to each of the 11 commissioners' names - is based on a consensus reached nine years ago by its designation committee that the building did not possess enough historical or architectural significance to warrant a hearing.

But as the date nears for the building's transformation into the new Museum of Arts and Design, a growing number of landmarks commissioners past and present are joining preservationists in urging the commission at least to hear the case for saving it.

Nine years ago, the committee's decision was unexceptionable. Two Columbus Circle, which opened in 1964 as Huntington Hartford's Gallery of Modern Art, was designed by Edward Durell Stone in a style most memorably characterized by Ada Louise Huxtable, then the architecture critic of The New York Times, as resembling "a die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops." It was a building New Yorkers loved to hate.

Hearts began to soften, however, as plans formed to demolish or alter the building, which has been owned by the city since 1980 and has been vacant since 1998.

"Something rather wonderful has occurred, by which the building, rarely anyone's favorite in the past, is looking better every day," said Vincent Scully, the Sterling professor emeritus of art history at Yale University, in an Aug. 14 letter asking Robert B. Tierney, the commission chairman, to hold a hearing.

"Its own integrity, its uniqueness, the indomitable determination to make a point that produced it, are coming to the fore and are powerfully affecting the way we see it," Mr. Scully wrote. "It is in fact becoming the icon it never was, one about which the city now cares a great deal."

The commission itself has acknowledged the redemptive power that the passage of time holds for once-ugly ducklings. In May, it designated the former Summit Hotel at Lexington Avenue and 51st Street, designed by Morris Lapidus and completed in 1961, using language that could be applied almost word for word to 2 Columbus Circle.

"Some writers greeted the new hotel with disappointment or amusement, while others viewed it as a disharmonious addition to the streetscape," the commission said. "In subsequent years, however, the hotel attracted an increasing number of admirers."

The transformation of sentiment about 2 Columbus Circle has not registered at the commission, where Mr. Tierney continues to rely on the decision made in June 1996 by a four-member committee: the Rev. Thomas F. Pike, Prof. Sarah Bradford Landau, Charles Sachs and Vicki Match Suna.

Significantly, Professor Landau, of New York University, has now joined three other former commissioners - William E. Davis, Stephen M. Raphael and Mildred F. Schmertz - in calling for a hearing.

"Had there been such a large and broad demand for a public hearing about the building in 1996, I'm not at all sure I would have voted the way I did," Professor Landau said yesterday in an e-mail message. "It is in the long-term interest of the commission to maintain good rapport with the preservation community. Whether the building merits designation is another issue, and should be decided by the current commission."

Mr. Raphael said the former commissioners were responding to a July 30 Op-Ed article in The Times by Sherida E. Paulsen, a former chairwoman. She wrote that the decision not to consider 2 Columbus Circle reflected "the professional judgment of the 19 people" who had been on the commission since 1996.

BUT Mr. Raphael said, "Some of us neither participated in this decision nor were we asked to acquiesce in it." He and the others wrote that the 1996 decision "does not set a binding precedent" and that strong public interest "may be a valid policy reason" to hold a hearing, which is "not tantamount to granting a building landmark status."

Gene A. Norman, a former chairman, and Beverly Moss Spatt, a former chairwoman, have publicly called for a hearing. David F. M. Todd said about his term as chairman in 1989 and 1990, "The spirit - at least then - was, if the public wants a hearing, let's have a hearing."

"I'm primarily interested in the law being strengthened, not weakened, by this situation," Mr. Todd said yesterday.

Laurie Beckelman, a former chairwoman, directs the new building program at the Museum of Arts and Design, which plans to reclad 2 Columbus Circle with a new facade designed by Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture.

Councilman Bill Perkins, who convened a "people's hearing" on 2 Columbus Circle last month, introduced a bill yesterday to give the Council power to direct the landmarks commission to hold hearings. "People can differ on whether something should be a landmark," he said, "but they can find common ground on the need to have a hearing."

At least, they could try.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

[TalB]

http://www.observer.com/therealestate/
Council Nosing In

http://www.observer.com/therealestate/2columbus.jpg

City Council member Bill Perkins has taken the 2 Columbus Circle fray to the legislative chamber by introducing a bill that would require the Landmarks Preservation Commission to hold public hearings on alterations to any building the City Council thinks it should hold hearings about. All the council needs to do is get a majority to vote for having the hearings.

Preservationists and activists have been trying to compel the L.P.C. to hold a hearing on the Edward Durrell Stone–designed building for years. To no avail, though; the L.P.C. is standing by its 1996 decision that the building doesn't have enough historical or architectural import for consideration.

Mr. Perkin's legislation also requires the L.P.C. to hold a hearing to determine whether any building under landmarks consideration should be listed on the state Register of Historic Places.

- Matthew Grace

Posted by Tom 8/19/2005 09:29:00 AM
Permalink

[cinemawatcher]

I miss NYC. Wanna hang out at Columbus Circle...

[Jo]

http://www.nationaltrust.org/11most/2004/images/popup4_2_columbus.jpg
View of interior gallery, circa 1964.

http://www.nationaltrust.org/11most/2004/images/popup5_2_columbus.jpg
View of interior auditorium, circa 1964.

The wood paneling, probably removed a long time ago, should have been preserved as a style warning to future generations!
Actually I like the retro feel of it :cheers:

[TalB]

http://www.nypost.com/realestate/comm/52933.htm
LOLLIPOP GROUP'S LICKED

By STEVE CUOZZO
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
September 6, 2005 -- TWO new court rulings might be the death blow to preservation activists' increasingly personal campaign against the imminent sale of 2 Columbus Circle, the "Lollipop" building, to the Museum of Arts & Design.

On the eve of the holiday weekend, a state Supreme Court judge threw out two more cases filed by preservationist group Landmark West. One said the Lollipop is a "public place" like a park, and thus requires state legislative approval to be sold.

The other charged that Landmarks Preservation Commission Chairman Robert Tierney, museum Director Holly Hotchner and museum Project Director Laurie Beckelman had personally engaged in a "conspiracy" not to hold a public hearing on the building.

The museum, represented by CB Richard Ellis' Lewis Buffalino, has a contract to buy the Lollipop from the city for $17 million, but the blizzard of lawsuits has held up the deal.

Hotchner said, "Obviously we're delighted that the lawsuits did not have legs behind them" and expressed confidence the sale will soon close.

The rulings were a momentous legal victory for the city and the museum, who have previously licked the activists in three other courts.

In one case, Landmark West accused the city of dodging the law when it decided to sell to the museum, despite overwhelming votes by Manhattan community board members and elected officials and by the City Council. An appeals court unanimously upheld the city.

In another, the plaintiffs claimed a public hearing held before the community boards' vote was invalid because it took place in August, when New Yorkers "traditionally" take vacations.

Last week, Judge Michael Stallman advised Landmark West to "forebear from further litigation and extravagant rhetoric."

But the group's executive director, Kate Wood, told us: "We plan to appeal and will continue to seek damages against those responsible for causing the destruction of 2 Columbus Circle by subverting the proper governmental functioning of the Landmarks Commission."

[BigMac]

September 9, 2005:

http://img355.imageshack.us/img355/1017/10cclarge2tv.jpg

[TalB]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/16/nyregion/16lives.html
Public Lives

Taking a Chisel to 2 Columbus Circle, With No Regrets

By ROBIN FINN
Published: September 16, 2005

HOLLY HOTCHNER bops into her subterranean office at the Museum of Arts and Design on West 53rd Street with one crimson-manicured hand at full extension and her startling nimbus of auburn hair rippling like a flag in a stiff wind. Her copious freckles, invigorated by a week of hard hiking in the Utah sunshine, resemble dappled body armor. Even her jewelry - a wire cuff, a hefty diamond engagement band and an oversized beaded floral necklace that rates jaw-dropping reactions on the street - packs a tacit punch.

Without being asked, she rips into an infomercial for "Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation 2," the museum's "boundary-breaking" display of modern artifacts by Native American artists; it opens on Sept. 22 and is, she vows, one-of-a-kind. Political. A must-see.

She looks and sounds, in short, like a woman capable of mowing down any obstacle in her path, including the derelict nine-story white elephant at 2 Columbus Circle that the museum agreed to buy from the city for $17 million in 2002 and intends to use as its flagship, after a sophisticated $30 million face-lift that has provoked four lawsuits from preservationists. She is psyched at the prospect of reinventing the museum she runs: "It's sort of a real dream to be able to build a museum in New York City." A legacy for a would-be sculptor who never saw herself in "a desk job."

She promises that the sculptural elements of 2 Columbus Circle, which she describes as "a designated mausoleum" in its current incarnation, will be retained, but stands by the Landmarks Preservation Commission's decision not to award the building landmark status: "It's not like we're going in there at midnight with a wrecking ball. This building has more than had its day in court."

Buoyed by a Sept. 1 court ruling in favor of the museum, Ms. Hotchner, its director since 1996, when it was fumbling along in obscurity and insolvency as the American Craft Museum, hopes to start ripping into concrete next month. Appeals? Not a deterrent. The two-year litigation delay has already cost the museum $5 million in overruns, equal to its yearly operating budget.

Clarification: She doesn't actually want to gut "the lollipop" building, the oddball marble-clad structure Edward Durell Stone designed in the kitschy 60's to house the modern art collection of Huntington Hartford. Rather, she wants to liberate it from hibernation and, courtesy of an external infusion of light-hued terra cotta and glassy fenestration, throw it a lifeline.

"I've never heard of anyone who likes the building aesthetically," she says, seated at a black glass desk trimmed in masculine black leather (don't ask; it's a freebie hand-me-down). Sure, the desk is ugly, she adds, but at least it functions. Unlike 2 Columbus Circle, which is arguably ugly, but doesn't. "The word 'ugly' comes up again and again," she complains. "I think nearly everyone would agree 2 Columbus Circle is a tremendous eyesore; some of us call it the world's greatest urinal at this point."

Ms. Hotchner, who turned 54 on Sept. 11, is not intimidated by Landmark West, the Upper West Side preservation group, or the World Monuments Fund, which placed 2 Columbus Circle on its list of 100 endangered landmarks this summer. Quite the opposite. Back when she, in her own conservationist heyday (she's still on the board of the New York Landmarks Conservancy), was hired by the New-York Historical Society to preserve its museum collection, she was told that she ought to rethink her "very intimidating" hairdo. Opt for a librarian-ish bun. She balked. By 1988, she was museum director.

So maybe it's O.K., even in rarefied museum circles, to be a little intimidating?

"It's worked for me," says Ms. Hotchner, whose father, A. E. Hotchner, was Hemingway's biographer. She recalls Papa Hemingway as a bear of a guy, and not a teddy bear. "To a little girl of 4, he was frightening."

MS. HOTCHNER grew up in Manhattan, lived mostly at the Beresford, and attended the Dalton School. Her parents separated when she was young, and at 15, she lost her mother, a journalist for Look magazine and a publicist for David O. Selznick, to cancer. She attended Trinity College, and after graduating snagged a coveted spot at the Museum of Modern Art as a cataloger, for $6,500 a year. Her sculpture career went nowhere - "I didn't want to be a Sunday artist" - but she became focused on art conservation and pursued a master's in fine arts and a certificate of conservation at New York University.

Jobs at the Met and the Tate segued into what remains a favorite project, the restoration of a John La Farge mural at the Church of the Ascension. Ms. Hotchner, who lives on the Upper East Side with her husband, Franklin Silverstone, a curator and software entrepreneur, left the historical society in a state of burnout and started an art consulting business when a headhunter recruited her for her present job.

"On my first day, I walked in and the first thing I saw was a mouse, the second thing was an eviction notice on my desk, and the third was that the bookkeeper came in and said, 'We can't make the payroll this week,' " she recalls. "It really was like a Monty Python kind of thing." Ms. Hotchner suggested that perhaps the wisest business course for the craft museum would be to go out of business. Or change drastically. The board chose the second option. She dug in. Still is.

[BigMac]

New York Times
October 4, 2005

'Lollipop' Building Set to Be Revamped

By ROBIN POGREBIN

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/10/04/arts/04colu.jpg
How the exterior of the new museum at 2 Columbus Circle will look.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/10/04/arts/04colu_CA1.jpg
A model of the third-floor gallery as it will be redesigned in the Museum of Arts and Design.

Scaffolding is expected to start going up late this week at 2 Columbus Circle, opening the way for a controversial transformation of Edward Durell Stone's building into a new home for the Museum of Arts and Design.

"We are remaking a building," Brad Cloepfil, the project's architect, said yesterday. "Restructuring it, recladding it, letting the light in."

Nonetheless, Landmark West, the group that has led the effort to preserve the building, filed yet another lawsuit yesterday - its eighth - in an attempt to block the makeover. In its current action, Landmark West is appealing an appellate court judge's dismissal of its motion to have Robert B. Tierney, chairman of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, excluded from any decision on whether to hold a hearing on the building's status.

"This has been the focus of one of the most important preservation battles in history," Kate Wood, the executive director of Landmark West, said yesterday, "and could well become the Penn Station of Modernism."

She was referring to the razing of McKim, Mead & White's classic Beaux-Arts Penn Station in 1963, a loss that helped inspire the birth of the city's architectural preservation movement.

Under Mr. Cloepfil's redesign, horizontal and vertical openings would slice into the exterior of 2 Columbus Circle, allowing views from the galleries onto Central Park and more light in from the building's four different directions. He said the "ribbon of light" created by these slits would foster "a continuous experience of light through the building."

An exhibition of the design - on which Mr. Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture collaborated with Gary Edward Handel & Associates - is to go on display on Thursday at the Center for Architecture in Lower Manhattan.

The start of construction would seem to bring to a close a fractious chapter of local preservation history; for a decade, advocates have fought to save the 1964 structure or to at least have the commission schedule a hearing on potential landmark designation.

In an interview yesterday, Holly Hotchner, the director of the Museum of Arts and Design, said there was "nothing legally preventing work from starting" on the $60 million construction project, given the failure of previous legal challenges.

Advocates have argued that Stone's porthole-studded building, with its "lollipop"-style arcade, represents a turning point in modern architecture, when architects began to incorporate historicist motifs.

But Ms. Hotchner and Mr. Cloepfil said yesterday that the building had always been inhospitable, describing it as dark and claustrophobic.

"It's a concrete bunker," Ms. Hotchner said. "I'm not talking about taste. I'm talking about the experience of being in the building."

Mr. Cloepfil similarly described the building as "a big, closed concrete box," adding that "as a building, it doesn't function."

Of his design, he said: "It's like unzipping the building at the seams. It really unfolds the space."

The building opened as Huntington Hartford's Gallery of Modern Art; that museum closed in 1969 and then reopened as the New York Cultural Center. Gulf and Western Industries purchased the building in 1975 and presented it to the city in 1980, which installed the Department of Cultural Affairs there and the city's visitors' bureau. Both moved out in 1998, and in 2002 the city designated the Museum of Arts and Design as the site's developer.

The renovation, to be completed by early 2008, will give the museum 16,000 square feet of exhibition space, compared with its current 7,000 at 40 West 53rd Street. This extra room will allow the institution, formerly the American Craft Museum, to display much of its permanent collection, Ms. Hotchner said. She said she hoped to weave the collection - including furniture, architectural installations and jewelry - through four exhibition floors.

The first level of the building will have 13 feet of glass around the base, whereas the current arches top off at eight feet. There will be a larger lobby, a museum store and a restored auditorium. A restaurant will be returned to its former location on the ninth floor - with three sides of windows instead of one - and systems will be installed to regulate temperature and humidity.

Because the Museum of Arts and Design emphasizes materials and artistic technique, three or four demonstration studios will also be open to the public, Ms. Hotchner said. She said she wanted the building's material to highlight the museum's program inside; as a contemporary art museum, ceramic and glass are among its primary media.

By cladding the building in terra cotta and using different kinds of glass in different places - clear, fritted and translucent - Mr. Cloepfil said, the project will make the surface somewhat opalescent, reflecting different colors depending on the time of day. He said he was essentially preserving the lollipop motif - which will be visible inside the lobby - because it serves a structural load-bearing purpose.

The museum now has an annual operating budget of $5 million and yearly attendance of 225,000. In the new building, these are expected to increase to $8 million and 450,000, respectively.

Mr. Cloepfil said that one of the overreaching goal was to bring life to Columbus Circle. "We really want to revitalize Columbus Circle," Mr. Cloepfil said, "to take a building which has been private and make it public."

The new museum would complete the circle's recent makeover, which has included the Time Warner Center - including Jazz at Lincoln Center - and a renewed fountain sitting area.

"The architectural goal is transforming a building that's an image into a complete architectural experience," Mr. Cloepfil added.

At the same time, he said, he was trying "to carry forward some kind of memory of what's happened there for the last 40 years."

"I think you can do both," he said.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

[BigMac]

Other renderings:

http://www.curbed.com/archives/2005_02_2columbuscircle.jpg

http://www.thecityreview.com/hhart3.jpg

http://www.archnewsnow.com/features/images/Feature0111_04x.jpg

[alexx02]

I remember when I was young walking by that building and always wondering what it was. It has grown on my since, and the least they could have done was kept the faux-venetian columns on the bottom. The very least.

After the renovation it will look so boring, and bland. That building really is a bore if you look at it. With the random gashes to the facade, that pastey white skin, the lollipop gave columbus circle some perspective, and a different look honestly. It really was something differnet. Why does New York insist on tearing down it's past?

[7 World Trade]

the renovation design looks more like a veil covering the building's real identity than a real facade. it's so friggin fake looking, definitely not a match to the unconventional but at least coherent design.

[TalB]

http://www.nypost.com/seven/10072005/news/regionalnews/53421.htm
SWEET 'LOLLIPOP'

By JENNIFER FERMINO
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.nypost.com/photos/news100705019.jpg
WHAT IT WILL LOOK LIKE: The proposed renovation for the empty building at 2 Columbus Circle is seen in this artist's rendering

October 7, 2005 -- The proposed renovation for the empty building at 2 Columbus Circle is seen in this artist's rendering.

After years of lawsuits and bitter public feuding, the problems hounding the vacant "Lollipop" building at 2 Columbus Circle appear to have been licked.

Architects yesterday unveiled their $60 million plans for the building — and it's a far cry from the gloomy, windowless Edward Durell Stone creation currently occupying that spot.

A model of the new light-filled design is now on public display at the Center for Architecture in lower Manhattan.

"We're opening it up and bringing it back to life," said architect Brad Cloepfil, of Allied Works Architecture.

The 54,000-square-foot building, which will house the Museum of Arts and Design when completed in 2008, will remain roughly the same size and odd, parallelogram shape.

But the new ground floor is slated to feature floor-to-ceiling windows all around and a museum gift shop. The second to fifth floors also will have thin, zigzagged windows cut out of the iridescent terracotta and glass exterior.

"The not very wide strips of light are what's different than other buildings," said Holly Hotchner, the museum's director. "It's a unique design."

Scaffolding will start going up today and the renovation will take about 18 months, she said.

"We are raring to go," Hotchner said. "The delays have been difficult."

The delays she's referring to are the numerous lawsuits filed by Landmark West, a preservationist group.

Hotchner yesterday dismissed their gripes, stating she was confident there were no legal barriers left to the renovations.

"Everyone believes in the process that's happened. It's been totally legal," she said.

But Kate Wood, director of Landmark West, said there hadn't been a public hearing for the development. "The feeling across the board is when a building excites this much attention, it deserves a public hearing."

Many preservationists in her group would like to see the building receive landmark status and fear the revamping would be an architectural blunder to match the 1963 razing of Penn Station.

On Monday, they filed an appeal on an old lawsuit, one of eight the group has launched.

One Landmark West member who wants things to remain the same, Donald Fowle, told The Post: "I understand people say it's the Lollipop. But I think it's beautiful."

[alexx02]

God the redesign is ugly. The think they are liberating it, but it's just so cliche, with the ghastly gashes all over the face of the building.

[BigMac]

Curbed
October 31, 2005

http://www.curbed.com/2005_10_lollipop.jpg

Only now - after the preservationists at 2 Columbus Circle have been all but licked - does that street-level scaffolding come down to reveal the famous lollipops. Talk about sucky timing.

Copyright © 2005 Curbed

[TalB]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/14/arts/design/14pres.html
Turning Up the Heat on a Landmarks Agency

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
Published: November 14, 2005

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/11/14/arts/14pres_CA0.jpg
Landmark West
2 Columbus Circle on a Web site devoted to architectural preservation.

Someone has stolen one of my buildings! That was the panicked reaction of Beverly Moss Spatt, then the chairwoman of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, after the cast-iron facades of a building by James Bogardus were spirited away from a downtown lot in 1974. The 1849 facades, supposedly protected by official landmark status, had been disassembled and stored for eventual relocation at another site. But thieves broke into the lot and sold most of them off as scrap metal.

Three decades later, Ms. Spatt, now retired, is one of the people fighting to save 2 Columbus Circle, a 1965 building by Edward Durell Stone, in one of the biggest preservation uproars in a generation. But this time it is the commission itself that seems to have been hijacked.

Once considered the most powerful agency of its kind, the commission has lost the confidence of many mainstream preservationists by repeatedly refusing to hold a public hearing on the building's fate. At the urging of those preservation advocates, a city councilman, Bill Perkins, has introduced a bill that could force the commission to hold public hearings on potential landmarks. The implication is that the commission cannot always be trusted to protect the public interest.

The bill, which is to come before a City Council subcommittee that meets at 11 this morning, would require a public hearing on any building that has been determined eligible for listing on the state register of historic places. It would also allow the City Council to demand such a public hearing in a majority vote.

The bill probably comes too late to save 2 Columbus Circle, where scaffolding began to rise this month. (The building has been sold to the Museum of Arts and Design, which plans to remake the interior and clad its white marble Venetian-style façade in terra-cotta tiles.) The aim is rather to ensure that similar debacles can be averted in the future.

But the bill does not specifically address the sad reality that the commission no longer seems willing to fulfill its role as a defender of the city's architectural legacy. This is not solely the fault of its chairman, Robert B. Tierney, on whom much of the controversy has focused. It has to do with a subtle but crucial shift in how the commission does business. Founded in 1965 in response to the tragic razing of Penn Station two years earlier, the Landmarks Preservation Commission has traditionally been made up of independent voices with deep roots in the preservation community.

The commission's power to protect a building in virtual perpetuity - and its willingness to use that power - made it the most powerful such agency in the United States. Its chairmen were often willing to stand up to the mayor when they felt a principle was at stake.

The gradual shift away from those convictions had its seeds in the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970's, which spurred the rise of public-private partnerships with developers. Developers gained increasing power over how the city was shaped. Playing on the public's fear, many politicians argued that the only alternative was a descent into blight and crime.

That attitude reached its apogee during the Giuliani administration, which often appointed commission members more for their political ties than for their records as advocates for architecture. Jennifer Raab, the commission's chairwoman from 1994 to 2001, was a real estate lawyer who had worked as a campaign aide on Rudolph W. Giuliani's staff. Mr. Tierney, a appointment by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, is a former lobbyist with deeper political ties than preservation experience.

The shift toward political expediency has been aggravated by soaring real estate prices in almost every corner of the city. Significant but little-noticed works of architecture that are now standing on valuable land, making them that much more vulnerable to demolition. Among the buildings preservationists are worried most about these days are the 1964 New York State Pavilion, designed by Philip Johnson, in Queens, and the Domino Sugar plant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, from the 1890's. Neither building has yet to receive a hearing by the Landmarks Commission.

If passed, the Perkins bill would shift the balance of power somewhat. Requiring the commission to hold a public hearing on any building that is being considered for the state historical register would at least prevent travesties like the commission's stonewalling on 2 Columbus Circle. And it would add a dose of transparency to the commission's decision-making process.

But in the long run, what is needed is a ruthless analysis of the landmark designation process. The commission's research staff has been cut in half over the last decade because of budget reductions. This makes it difficult for the commission to identify buildings that deserve consideration. And if the bill succeeds, the commission's workload is certain to expand.

Of course, more City Council input would not necessarily help the preservationist cause. The council has its own political agenda. It recently overturned the commission's decision to grant landmark status to the 1969 Jamaica Savings Bank in Queens, and preservationists fear that it intends to do the same to the Austin, Nichols & Co. Warehouse, a 1915 building in Williamsburg, designed by Cass Gilbert, in a council vote scheduled for Nov. 22. The vast structure, admired for its Egyptian Revival motifs, stands on the site of a proposed residential waterfront development; the local city councilman, David Yassky, has already declared that the building doesn't merit landmark protection.

The only hope to be derived from this struggle is that the fate of 2 Columbus Circle will harden the resolve of a younger generation of preservation advocates who are less willing to accept the status quo. The drive to save 2 Columbus Circle, after all, was led by Landmark West, founded in 1985 and led by Kate Wood, rather than more established institutions like the Municipal Art Society, which opposes the Perkins bill.

This new generation of advocates seems eager to discuss what parts of our city's heritage deserve protection, and they have clearly not hesitated to lead the charge against an inexorable political process, filing one legal appeal after another to save Edward Durell Stone's building. Vanquished on that front as the scaffolding went up this month at Columbus Circle, Landmark West set up a streaming Webcast of the building titled "Shame Cam" (landmarkwest.org/webcam/javlw.html).

Not everyone, it seems, is satisfied with business as usual.

[TalB]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/25/arts/design/25ouro.html
A Vision of a Mobile Society Rolls Off the Assembly Line

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
Published: December 25, 2005

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/12/21/arts/ouro.184.2.jpg
Librado Romero/The New York Times
The failure to preserve 2 Columbus Circle in Manhattan illustrates a narrow view of Modernism.

LET'S be optimistic. Some spectacular buildings were completed this year - and what matters more to an architecture lover?

The London-based architect Zaha Hadid, a precocious talent who is only now winning the kinds of mainstream commissions she richly deserves, wrapped up two stunning buildings, both potent examples of how Modernism is being reimagined for the 21st century. And Rem Koolhaas's 1,300-seat concert hall in Porto, Portugal, should finally establish him as one of the world's great designers as well as the profession's mightiest thinker.

Ms. Hadid's boomerang-shaped BMW plant in Leipzig, Germany, with its sensual curves and purring assembly lines, did for the computerized auto plant what Giacomo Mattè-Trucco's Lingotto Factory in Turin, Italy, did for the old labor-based model in the 1920's: project a powerful vision of a mobile society. At the same time, she has rejected the regimented order that gave the machine age a dehumanizing quality.

Ms. Hadid's science center in Wolfsburg, Germany, also comes to terms with Modernism's authoritarian strain. Built in the shadow of a Nazi-era auto plant, its dynamic concrete form, evoking the prow of a ship sailing through space, sits on gigantic inhabitable cones that allow the surrounding street life to flow directly underneath. It celebrates her knack for fluid, seamless spaces that blur the boundary between interior and public realms.

But for me the biggest sensation was Mr. Koolhaas's concert hall, Casa da Música, packed with urban energy as if in response to Porto's sleepy atmosphere. The building's chiseled concrete form, resting on a carpet of polished stone, suggests a bomb about to explode.

None of these buildings are in major global cities. All three are designed by "star architects," a term that elicits eye-rolling or outright contempt in some circles today, as if popular success is indistinguishable from selling out. Flush with new projects, a widely respected architect told me recently that he felt nostalgic for the days when there was little work for anyone, as if unemployment were better for the creative soul.

It may be true that talents like Ms. Hadid and Mr. Koolhaas have sucked some of the oxygen from members of a younger generation struggling to find their footing in a celebrity-driven profession. The jury is still out on that one. But either way, these buildings prove that architecture is in the midst of a renaissance. Whatever one imagines about the egos of their architects, these projects exude a social dynamism and freedom - a thriving democratic ideal.

What's more, such buildings force us to re-examine corners of Modernist history that once seemed relegated to the scrapheap. Their architects are clearly influenced by talents as far ranging as Kevin Roche, Hans Scharoun and Oswald Mathias Ungers, whose tough, sometimes brutal forms were once excluded from the Modernist canon.

The problem is how few people seem capable of such a generous view of history. Recent landmark preservation battles in New York suggest that the civic powers-that-be insist on defending a narrow view of the past and of Modernism in particular. That became apparent during the crusade to preserve Edward Durell Stone's so-called lollipop building at 2 Columbus Circle, a landmark of late Modernism, when the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission refused to schedule a public hearing to consider its designation. As a result, the facade is being utterly revamped.

This was an atrocious betrayal of the public trust. A similar debate is unfolding in Berlin, where the German government plans to demolish the 1970's Palast der Republik. The former home of the East German Parliament, it played host to cultural events and festivals as well as political conferences during the Communist years.

Both 2 Columbus Circle and the Berlin building represent important moments in their cities collective memories. The pressure to remake or raze them is arguably a form of censorship, a drive to cleanse history of anything but a strictly prescribed view of the past.

The most heartbreaking example of this attitude can be found in New Orleans, which had essentially been reduced to a theme park long before Hurricane Katrina hit in August. A conventional formula of convention center, casinos and themed historic neighborhoods was embraced to attract tourist dollars. That transformation, which went hand in hand with the neglect of the local infrastructure, was as responsible for suppressing the city's textured character as the ensuing storm and breached levees were. Now those same profit-minded forces, with their insistence on a touristy image of New Orleans, are circling the city again. They may well succeed in draining the city of what little life it has left.

We should be clearer about who the enemy is. Narrow visions, not big egos, are the problem.

[FROM LOS ANGELES]

Seriously, they need to add windows to that buildiung.

[A42251]

It looks like a prison.

[TalB]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/08/arts/design/08musc.html
The Secret History of 2 Columbus Circle

By HERBERT MUSCHAMP
Published: January 8, 2006

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/01/04/arts/musc.6.450.jpg
Photograph by Eddie Hauser/The New York Times; illustration by The New York Times

2 Columbus Circle in 1964, when it was new.

"FOURTH floor! Men's lingerie!"

So Henry Geldzahler, the great art curator, was heard to exclaim on emerging from the elevator at the opening of the Gallery of Modern Art in 1964. What a caution! There was a time when people thought better than to say such things in art museums. Talking of Michelangelo was more the rule. But the gallery was not regarded as a serious museum.

Created by Huntington Hartford, the publisher, show-business impresario and heir to the A.&P. supermarket fortune, the Gallery looked like the adventure in vanity that it actually was. It was conceived to house Mr. Hartford's personal collection of figurative art, and its design bore the personal imprint of his taste. His taste was swanky. From the sleek wood paneling to the dark brass fixtures, the building at 2 Columbus Circle could have passed for the East Coast outpost of a private casino from the land of Mr. Lucky.

Mr. Hartford probably never wore a tie tack, but you sensed he would have traded all his money to be reborn as Bobby Darin. His museum even had a penthouse lounge. Attached to the museum's restaurant, the Gauguin Room, it featured leather banquettes, paneledwalls adorned with tapestry versions of Gauguin paintings, and a spectacularview of Central Park. The restaurant downstairs served Polynesian delicacies in a white tablecloth atmosphere that suggested a finishing-school graduate of Trader Vic's. Satay chicken came garnished with a ring of spiced apple. The bar poured the swingin'est Singapore sling in town. Waiter!

HENRY GELDZAHLER, LACY UNDERWEAR, SWANKY TASTE, Singapore slings. These are a few of the memories that didn't get to be recollected at the public hearings that weren't held to debate the value of 2 Columbus Circle, the white marble bonbon of a building that was not designated an official New York City landmark.

And even if the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission had consented to hold hearings on the matter, many of the memories that might have weighed in favor of designation would still have gone unspoken. They were stored up by a generation of gay men who arrived in New York in the 1960's and contributed substantially to those shifts in taste. And that generation, lost to AIDS, is no longer here to talk about them.

Two Columbus Circle has been called a queer building many times over the years. Odd and weird, too. These terms have not been misplaced. But their meaning need not be wholly pejorative. No other building more fully embodied the emerging value of queerness in the New York of its day. If the Landmarks Commission could miss this significance, then it is reasonable to conclude that many dots in that chapter of the city's social history have yet to be connected. The task will grow no easier with the passing of time.

MORE THAN 80,000 NEW YORKERS have died of AIDS so far, according to city figures. That number represents more memory than a city can afford to lose. It stands for the collective memory of an audience - the seasoned gay audience, perhaps the most culturally receptive group any city has ever seen.

Early on in the AIDS crisis, the city registered the cultural impact caused by the loss of gay artists. The effect produced by the loss of the gay audience is more insidious, however. An audience retains the memory of a performance. What happens to that memory when the audience is gone?

Imagine the World Series without veteran sports fans. You could still fill the stadium. The crowd would still roar. But a certain resonance would have vanished, the vibrations of a social instrument devised for the precise purpose of detecting a historically outstanding performance. How could this instrument function without a data base of past scores?

Now imagine that the game is a great city. What happens to a city when it loses reliable points of comparison with exceptional moments in its past? A void occurs, and before long, the vacuum starts to fill up with myths of dubious worth. The fantasy that Rudolph W. Giuliani "saved" New York becomes conventional wisdom. The corollary fable that the 1960's and 70's were the nadir of New York's existence. Yeah, wasn't it awful! The worst!

The public hearings that weren't held might have offered a forum for sorting out that era's facts from fiction. Indeed, the landmarks agency can't conduct its business until it has properly reckoned with the period. And because the agency is itself a product of that era (it was founded a year after 2 Columbus Circle opened its doors), that would naturally have to include a reconsideration of its purpose.

You might even say that the building and the agency have had this date with destiny from the beginning: Edward Durell Stone's design for 2 Columbus Circle, a stylized version of Venetian Gothic architecture, was among the first to break the modernist taboo against explicit reference to period styles. The Landmarks Commission was established to resist modernity's brutal assault on New York's architectural history. Clearly, these two artifacts of the 60's had a lot to talk about.

Of course, the public doesn't need official permission to hear itself talk. We ought to take the microphone more often. We could start a new round of unofficial hearings by thinking back to the time before there was a Landmarks Commission. What was it that made some people believe that such an agency was worth having? What can we learn from those beliefs today, now that they are part of urban history themselves?

I HATE TO BE THE ONE TO TELL YOU THIS, but the old, relentlessly mourned Pennsylvania Station was a dismal piece of architecture. A late arrival in the City Beautiful movement, the building tried to augment meager conviction with extreme colonnades. Walking into its cold, cavernous spaces was like arriving in Philadelphia two hours before you had to.

But so what if Penn Station wasn't Grand Central? It was a crime to tear down a building that had become so deeply impregnated with New York's emotional life. The yawning interiors had a distinctive atmosphere. Like a vast sponge for intense expectations, the station soaked up the psychic energy of arrival, departure, separation, reunion and waiting that had accumulated over the years along with the soot, water damage and flimsy commercial intrusions. The station met the new arrival with a dare: can you make the big city know that you're alive? There's nothing like debased Beaux-Arts design for throwing out a frigid welcome.

A building does not have to be an important work of architecture to become a first-rate landmark. Landmarks are not created by architects. They are fashioned by those who encounter them after they are built. The essential feature of a landmark is not its design, but the place it holds in a city's memory. Compared to the place it occupies in social history, a landmark's artistic qualities are incidental.

AN AUDIENCE is more than a group of passive consumers. It can be a productive unit as well. It produces atmospheres, memories, arguments, textures of thought, a climate of receptivity and the stage on which performances occur. In the 60's, when freeways, shopping centers and expanding suburbs were leaving the future of the urban center open to serious doubt, an audience produced an extraordinary burst of energy about the idea of New York. Architectural preservation was part of that energy, and so was 2 Columbus Circle. Both were expressions of protest, and both were aimed at the same target: the exclusivity of High Modern taste in postwar New York.

In an era substantially defined by protests, these two - along with Pop Art, underground movies, the Belgium Pavilion at the 1964-65 New York World's Fair, Huntington Hartford's short-lived Show magazine and others - ran counter to the prevailing standards of High Modern taste with which the city asserted its postwar hegemony in the arts.

What these phenomena had in common was audience appeal - an appeal to the varieties of desire and conflict, to show biz, to memory, and above all to the open-ended heterogeneity of city life. You didn't see that in the perpetual reiteration of abstract paintings and glass towers.

These counter-positions to modernism's restrictive codes needed a stage, and a stage requires an audience attuned to the creative logic behind seemingly wanton events and who seizes the opportunity to help shape its own moment in time. That is where gay men came in.

WE WERE THE CHILDREN of white flight, the first generation to grow up in postwar American suburbs. By the time the 60's rolled around, many of us, the gay ones especially, were eager to make a U-turn and fly back the other way. Whether or not the city was obsolete, we couldn't imagine our personal futures in any other form. The street and the skyline signified to us what the lawn and the highway signified to our parents: a place to breathe free.

We must have resembled those scary blond children from "Village of the Damned." The moment Audrey Hepburn stepped out of the cab in the opening scene of "Breakfast at Tiffany's," our eyes started to glow. With the Hepburn character, Holly Golightly, we saw our defenses against the pain of isolation transformed into a glamorous style of independence.

The Glow was often provoked by gay-themed books. Sartre's "Saint Genet," John Rechy's "City of Night," James Baldwin's "Another Country," William S. Burroughs's "Naked Lunch": as each of these titles appeared, a dollop of queerness splashed down into the cultural mainstream. Each was a stage in the formation of what Herbert Gans calls a "taste culture," a social group bound together by the aesthetic preferences of its individual members. But the gay children of suburbia had yet to meet one another. We hadn't yet converged.

There was another side to the gay taste culture, a set of preferences formed long before these splashes occurred. Ronald Firbank novels, Aubrey Beardsley engravings, Victorian bric-a-brac, Art Nouveau and Art Deco ornaments, Fortuny fabrics, faded Hollywood stars: these artifacts were signs in a code, adopted before openness about homosexuality was possible. The love that dared not speak its name had learned to scream through décor.

This set of preferences also swirled into the mainstream: by 1967 every campus had a store that sold peacock feathers, Art Nouveau posters and paper versions of Tiffany lamps. "Notes on Camp," Susan Sontag's 1964 essay, was a turning point in this development. When the essay first appeared, it anatomized the code of a few. But the notice it attracted in magazines like Time expanded the audience to the many.

This shift represented something more than mainstream curiosity about recherché taste. It also signified that those who shared that taste were overcoming their isolation and discovering their identity as a social group. By 1969, when the Stonewall uprising sparked the emergence of a political movement for gay rights, the cultural revolution had already occurred. We were already out as an audience, and after that, there was never any possibility that we would go quietly back to a closet we had come here to get out of.

By the standards of Eisenhower's America, gay taste was perverse. In hindsight, it seems more like a corrective to the far greater perversity of postwar "progress." What kind of normality was it to imagine that abandoning American cities was a good thing to do?

Goodbye, cities! Adiós, civilization! Good riddance to the repository of cultural memory, the incubator of ideas, the heartbeat of humankind.

Quel norm.

MEMBERS OF MINORITY groups have always had to shift between alternate realities, that of the mainstream and that of the particular cultures to which they belong. This ability generates a kind of reality in its own right, a perceptual environment of fluctuating contour. Almost involuntarily, we shift the lens this way and that and examine things from multiple angles. We learn to live with the doubts, uncertainties and incentives to curiosity that result from playing more than one part in the script.

This is the reality that unfolded for a visitor like myself, a member of the gay audience, as I made my way through the Gallery of Modern Art in 1966. Of course I could see the features that displeased the critics. But to me, the matter wasn't so simple.

The swanky motif of the Gauguin Room continued in the galleries below. Mellow lighting came from artificial sources overhead, and from the vertical strips of small round windows that bordered the rooms. As at the Guggenheim, the galleries were arranged in a vertical spiral, though of square rather than curving geometry, and in place of an atrium, the building's core was given over to elevators and stairs. The galleries unfolded gracefully in an alternating sequence of larger and smaller areas with varied ceiling heights. In the basement was a small auditorium where daily pipe organ recitals were held: shades of the eccentric Dr. Albert C. Barnes and the music he insisted on playing for visitors at his museum outside Philadelphia.

MR. HARTFORD'S TASTE IN ART struck some as a demonstration of style rather than substance. An amalgamation of Pre-Raphaelite, Post-Impressionist and Surrealist painting, the collection denied the existence of abstract art and the qualities then associated with it: sincerity, difficulty and historical inevitability. Hence it invited association with the qualities abstract painters had defined themselves against: illustration, decoration, aristocratic caprice. Mr. Hartford's collection was a poodle, in short.

And the aura of poodleness extended to Stone's design for the building's exterior. The homage to Venetian Gothic inevitably recalled Fenway Court, the Boston palazzo of Isabella Stewart Gardner. It rolled back time to the world of the Victorians, to the ethos of John Ruskin, Walter Pater and the Aesthetic Movement, to a time before the Modern Movement's anxious energies came crashing through modern minds.

This was not acceptable. New York had staked its postwar claim to be the capital of the 20th century on its capacity to translate those energies into buildings, paintings, literature, dance. Even the decorative arts had a part to play in sustaining this image. The modernist dictates of Good Design meant that chairs, graphics and table settings tended toward formal abstraction. So who did this swanky playboy think he was, anyhow, coming in here with his Pre-Raphaelites and his Surrealists - those window dressers, fairy-tale illustrators, perfume bottle designers - and his building that looked like a gift spray flacon of My Sin blown up to the scale of a Macy's Thanksgiving Day float? How dare he call this poodle Modern Art!

IF YOU WERE PART OF THE GAY AUDIENCE, however, the criticisms aimed at Mr. Hartford's museum might have sounded oddly familiar. If you had sharp ears, you would have recognized the whirring of wheels, the creaking of old gears. The mechanisms for producing stigma were at work, an apparatus designed to give prejudices the appearance of ideas. And if you had been a target of this prejudice, you were less likely to discount the Gallery of Modern Art for any number of the aesthetic transgressions of which it stood accused.

Sexual ambiguity was integral to swank, for example. A prelude to the recent phenomenon of the metrosexual, the swanky guy adorned himself to a degree more commonly associated with feminine fashion. The taste culture of swank was socially ambiguous, too. Swank came out of the ghettos - Italian, Jewish, African-American and Hispanic. It was a pop vernacular for those seeking to transcend their exclusion from the WASP establishment. (Sammy Davis Jr. once affirmed that he never wore the same undershirt twice.) There was even room in it for gay WASP's, though by the mid-60's they were more likely to prefer the Rolling Stones to the Everly Brothers for fashion inspiration. Pop, in every form, had emerged by then as a paradoxical code for difference, a sign of independence from establishments of all kinds.

Mr. Hartford's collection, too, held a different set of meanings for the gay audience. An entire gallery was devoted to the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones. No stranger to us, Burne-Jones was part of the Victorian repertory. Still, I doubt it occurred to anybody since Ruskin's time to think of his work as "modern art." Rather, it illustrated some generalized idea of 19th-century decadence. Vuillard, another artist represented in depth, spoke for Mr. Hartford's support for work that was often belittled at the time as "merely" decorative.

It was the Surrealist work, however, that aroused the greatest discrepancy between gay and straight perspectives. By 1950, conventional wisdom had consigned Surrealism to the dustbin. Abstract Expressionism was the flower of New York's pre-eminence as the world's artistic center. As a home-grown movement, it was also suitable to represent American prestige after World War II. Surrealism, by contrast, stood for a Europe in decline, for empty theatrics, adolescent stunts and commercial corruption.

The gay audience didn't quite see it that way; or, if we did, we were not put off. Decadence was our family tree, weirdness our ancestral home, pathology our stock in trade. Theatrics went with the territory. And the dominance of Abstract Expressionism over Surrealism looked a lot like the dynamic between high school jocks and the fairies they'd tortured.

And, as some of us would later learn, if we didn't know already, sexual preference did play a part in the politics of the New York art world. New York Surrealists like Pavel Tchelitchew and Eugène Berman belonged to a gay subculture that had found greater acceptance in the uptown worlds of ballet and fashion than in the downtown Cedar Tavern scene populated by Pollock, Rothko and company. Ballet queens were not an ideal choice to carry the artistic standard for American supremacy in the 50's.

In any case, Modernism had become integral to our identity even before we'd left the suburbs. High Modern New York represented the antithesis of the nostalgic village appearance dictated by suburban developers. But the homogeneity of the International Style buildings revealed that city architecture, too, had become subject to a strict aesthetic code. Formalist functionalism.

The code wasn't the problem. The problem was that there weren't more of them. Why couldn't you revere Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building and yet wish that the architects Oscar Niemeyer and Luis Barragán had been given the opportunity to add a splash of Surrealism to the skyline? And why should American painting be governed by a winner-takes-all mentality? Why did we have to go on demanding that all comers be measured by a single yardstick? Isn't that the defining tactic of a closed mind? Why leave so much out, especially the unknown?

EDWARD DURELL STONE HAD ONCE ABIDED by the code. In fact, he'd helped to set it. In 1939, with Philip L. Goodwin, he had built the Museum of Modern Art, the temple where the codes were kept. In the postwar years, however, Stone abandoned modern orthodoxy for a more frankly decorative approach that featured the use of perforated ornamental screens. In his United States Embassy building for India, he perfected what you might call First Lady architecture, a lacy, soft power look to screen the harsh realities of the Cold War. By the mid-60's, the screen motif had been adopted by architects of institutional buildings nationwide.

For the Huntington Hartford Gallery, established to expand and reconsider the history of modern art, Venetian Gothic was a logical inspiration. The style had long been associated with Ruskin, the first British critic to pay serious attention to the work of living artists such as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He was a natural source for a building where Burne-Jones would be restored to public view.

Modern architects in the 20th century had no use for Ruskin. A critic who contended that ornament was the principal part of architecture held little appeal for designers whose aesthetic was based on engineering and the manipulation of abstract geometric form. But for Stone, who had broken with that aesthetic, Ruskin offered the welcome authority of historical precedent.

Venetian Gothic provided a similar authority for Stone's screens. A composite of Oriental and European influences, a Venetian Gothic building deploys screens in abundance. Talk about lingerie: with rows of delicate, filigreed arches, rosettes and quatrefoils arranged in colonnades and window banks, even the lowliest Grand Canal palazzo could set a young man's heart a-flutter.

It helped to have an aptitude for Victoriana to appreciate the design's references. No special knowledge was required, however, to see that the building departed from the modern norm. What the building exposed was how philosophically hollow that norm had become.

"ARCHITECTURE IS THE WILL OF AN EPOCH translated into space," Mies declared. And who dares to disobey the will of an epoch? As Karl Popper recognized, such prescriptive formulas are relics of historicism, the 19th-century's linear view of the past as a sequence of distinct epochs, each with its own distinctive style of art. Since the Egyptians, the Greeks and the Florentines each had produced a great style, we would be a lesser people if we did not do likewise.

Historicism had fallen out of favor some time before the International Style skyscrapers started marching up Park Avenue, however, and the ideology of the Modern Movement's universal progress could not be sustained indefinitely without it.

As the philosopher Allan Megill has argued, historicism was a secular religion to the Victorians, a source of authority for stable meanings and values at a time of disorienting change. The founding academy of Modernism was supposed to refute this. Instead, it simply made the present yet another historical period. In place of tradition, the Bauhaus preached the idea of progress. But the premise was exactly the same.

An International Style steel-and-glass tower might look all shiny and new, in other words, but its heart belonged to Queen Victoria. On what basis, then, could we exclude Ruskin, or Stone's homage to him, at 2 Columbus Circle? Its heart belongs to Victoria's Secret.

The quarrel in the 60's was not with modern art but with the politics that came attached to it, the politics that mistook artistic preferences and dogmas for universal standards, that devoted itself to enforcing taboos and stigmatizing those who challenged them. But the gay audience knew from personal experience that one way to resist is to inventory those taboos and put them in a new frame of reference.

The pioneer modernists had done just that in getting their movement off the ground. As we saw it, we were closer to them in spirit than were those who inherited the movement, who failed to see how unyielding it had become. We were constructing a new framework from the stuff left behind by the mainstream even as we were entering the mainstream ourselves.

Not the least of Mr. Hartford's gifts to us were the negative responses his museum aroused. They revealed how much had been left outside the modern framework. Especially delicious was Alfred Frankfurter's observation that the Gauguin Room "looks all too much as if strip-teasers, already conveniently reduced to grass skirts, were about to do a Polynesian floor show."

Let the hula begin.

THE GAY AUDIENCE IS A STEREOTYPE: all those silly boys clapping their hands to a pulp whenever Judy hit a high note or Marlene got both sides of her mouth working at more or less the same time. We love you, Maria! Any Maria. But our enthusiasm was not confined to broken-down divas. We also had a thing for broken-down buildings. We can give ourselves a lot of credit for the emergence of architectural preservation as a major force in contemporary urban life.

Will Fellows does. His book "A Passion to Preserve," published in 2004 by the University of Wisconsin Press, explores the history of the preservation movement. Subtitled "Gay Men as Keepers of Culture," the book asserts that a cater-cornered coalition between gay men and straight women has been the movement's spine. It also unpacks the psychological motivation that has driven some of these good folks to reclaim artifacts from modernity's trash. Paraphrasing no less an authority than Liberace, Mr. Fellows calls it "the thrill of redemption." Now there's a crowd-pleaser.

The gay audience, excluded by society, has an organic relationship to artifacts that have been rejected by society's taste-makers. Pluck a discarded ornament out of the town dump, take it home, polish it up and put it on a pedestal: it's a way of refusing to abide by rules designed to shut you out. Somebody once loved that old lamp, that old building, that old street, that old neighborhood, that city that progress left behind.

It's now intellectually fashionable to place the 60's and 70's in the Dumpster. Like that old lamp. Oh, the horror. Ah, the humanity! Remember "planned shrinkage"? That was the concept of managed belt-tightening devised in the 70's for a New York of diminished expectations, a city buffeted by crime rates, abandoned buildings, the departure of corporate headquarters, the loss of manufacturing jobs, and the fiscal crisis that exposed our woes to the world's sarcastic gaze.

But some people just loved that dirty old lamp. And if we were to give those years the once-over with a damp cloth, we might better appreciate that the love we felt for the city then is still feeding into the city of today.

MR. HARTFORD SHUT DOWN THE GALLERY of Modern Art in 1969. The collection was dispersed, the property transferred to Fairleigh Dickinson University. Renamed the New York Cultural Center, the venue presented temporary shows of distinction: it was the city's first bona-fide kunsthalle. A nightclub, Cabaret in the Sky, was installed in the penthouse restaurant. Presenting night life as a kind of performance art, it featured acts by Jackie Curtis, Holly Woodlawn, Cherry Vanilla and other downtown superstars, habitués of Mickey Ruskin's legendary restaurant Max's Kansas City. Showtime!

By then, alternative histories of modernism were becoming common. Writings by Francis Haskell, Robert Rosenblum and other art historians were exploring the critical role played by rediscovery and revision in times of cultural change. These writings became part of the new framework that was emerging out of the formerly excluded. So did the re-examination of pop culture conducted by scholars as well as by popular authors like Tom Wolfe.

Female impersonators like Jackie Curtis, Holly Woodlawn, Candy Darling, Wayne County and the Hot Peaches were also part of it. They were an alternative modernism, too. Just as the Bauhaus designers dealt with the conventions of industrial production, the transvestites of those years were exploring the conventions of gender production by the image-making industries that were then coming into their own. Goodbye, Henry Ford. Hello, Estée Lauder.

Performers like Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn mattered for a more important reason: they were a phenomenon of the audience, of the city's new frame of cultural reference. There's no such thing as a bad drag act. There are only bad drag-act audiences. A female impersonator functions chiefly as a stand-in for the deranged mosaic of theatrical stereotypes that spectators have stored up in their heads. As mistresses of ceremony for this synthetic work in progress, these two personified the shift that concluded the final days of High Modern New York. They signaled the erosion of trust in top-down cultural pronouncements and the commencement of a period when the relationship between High and Low would be extensively reconsidered.

The audience was the critical factor in this process. But audience didn't mean popularity. It stood for a quality, not merely the quantity, of people in attendance. It represented the trait of receptivity, of paying attention to events occurring within the mind as well as those outside it. This trait is fundamental to the construction of memories and to the uses we make of them.

CHANGE PARTNERS, ONE MORE TIME. In 1980, 2 Columbus Circle acquired a third tenant when Gulf and Western, which had purchased the property in the mid-70's, donated it to the city for use by the new Department of Cultural Affairs. Geldzahler, the curator of 20th-century art at the Metropolitan Museum, was back, this time as host: in 1977, Mayor Edward I. Koch had appointed him the department's commissioner after it was separated from the Department of Parks, Recreation and Cultural Affairs. Geldzahler held the position until 1982.

Some people I knew who worked for him complained bitterly about 2 Columbus Circle. The early 80's were a golden age of complaining. But I can remember thinking that the building had finally come into its own. With its white marble exterior, its curving facade, its flagpoles jutting out at a jaunty angle and its associations with Stone's government work, the building had always projected a quasi-official image. Now you could drop the quasi.

When he got the job, Geldzahler quipped that he felt as if he'd been made wheat commissioner of Kansas. But the larger gain was the city's. It felt like a wish fulfillment to gaze at the building from Central Park West - the contrast of the white exterior against the dingy Midtown backdrop was always one of its best features - and know that New York had conferred this symbolic recognition on its cultural workers. Knowing that Geldzahler was the city's first openly gay commissioner added to the sense of pride some of us felt. It wasn't a big deal, and yet it was.

The audience was Geldzahler's wheat. His department did not produce plays, paintings, books or ballets. It supported the museums, dance companies, libraries and other institutions that enabled larger audiences to gain access to these experiences. In the process, the city gained access to itself in a new way. The idea of the audience began to displace the idea of the public as a measure of civic reality.

Because the audience supplied the meaning. Andy Warhol's multimedia show "The Exploding Plastic Inevitable"; Robert Rauschenberg's ventures into performance with Billy Kluver's Experiments in Art and Technology; the art opening without pictures; Cheetah (a nightclub without performers); the new girl in town; lights, cameras, reaction: the events of the 60's helped to catalyze the emergence of the active audience, the productive audience, the spontaneous organization of individuals around the act of paying attention.

Today the audience is largely identified with consumerism. That was far less the case 40 years ago. For us, the audience was a medium of discovery. It allowed the emotions of individuals to flow into a public setting. When emotions have been bottled up, as they were with us, the effect of releasing them is overwhelming. In the 60's, the space of the audience expanded from the theater to the city at large. The energy that flowed into that setting was driven by adolescent hormones. We were eager to attach ourselves not only to one another but to the streets.

Geldzahler's coming-out moment occurred when he was presenting an award to Allen Ginsberg at the National Arts Club. He had planned to thank the poet for making it possible for gay men to live with pride. At the last moment, he inserted the words "like me." The disclosure earned a small notice in the newspaper the following day. (Ginsberg's reply was and is not for your ears.)

But what would Mayor Koch say? Randall Bourscheidt, Geldzahler's deputy, recalls that his boss was at home when the phone rang at 8 the next morning: "Henry? It's Ed. Have you called your mother?"

CHAPTER 4 IN THE BUILDING'S HISTORY was the date that never materialized. It got under way in 1996, when the Landmarks Commission first turned down an application to hold a public hearing on 2 Columbus Circle. Despite protests from preservationists, the commission refused to reconsider that position. It has refused to expand the definition of history to include the lives and times of living people, especially still-suspect ones. This action showed that the commission could deflate cultural artifacts as well as inflate them when it was convenient to do so. An agency established to enlarge our awareness of history was now in the business of condoning its erasure.

A vibrant city is perpetually recreated from the emotional depths, and from our socialized capacity to empathize with the memories of others. A landmarks commission embodies this capacity in administrative form. It should be the agency's business to know when somebody's memory is being stepped on.

Today, 2 Columbus Circle is being transformed into the new home of the Museum of Arts and Design. (The city sold the building to the museum in October.) Brad Cloepfil's design for the remodeling of Stone's exterior, now under way, isn't bad enough to