MoMA to Demolish American Folk Art Museum Building

Façade of the American Folk Art Museum (image via Flickr user 0x294)

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is proceeding with its controversial plans to bulldoze the American Folk Art Museum building, the Wall Street Journal has reported. The museum was previously persuaded to recant their April 2013 decision to raze the 2001 building by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects and promised to work to incorporate the structure into the museum’s expansion. But the architects responsible for the 105,000 square-foot redesign ultimately balked at this compromise. “Here, there’s a kind of ethical problem that to save the building … you end up losing so much of it that in the end, the integrity is gone,” architect Liz Diller of the firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro told the Wall Street Journal.

The structure’s original architects, Williams and Tsien, were reportedly informed of the decision in person by Diller and her husband, Ricardo Scofidio. In a statement cited by the Journal, “Mr. Williams and Ms. Tsien said the decision was a ‘missed opportunity to find new life and purpose for a building that is meaningful to so many.’” (The full statement is posted on the blog of the Architect’s Newspaper.) The American Folk Art Museum sold the building to MoMA in 2011 and moved to a space one-sixth its size at 2 Lincoln Square on the Upper West Side.

Paul Goldberger has an early critical reaction over at Vanity Fair:

The brooding, somber façade of the folk-art museum, made of folded planes of hammered bronze, combines monumental dignity with the image of delicate handcrafting, and it is a majestic, if physically small, architectural achievement. A city that allows such a work to disappear after barely a dozen years is a city with a flawed architectural heart. A large cultural institution that cannot find a suitable use for such a building is an institution with a flawed architectural imagination.

Update: At 6:40pm EST, MoMA released a statement from director Glenn Lowry on the subject of the expansion. Regarding the fate of the American Folk Art Museum building, it reads:

The plans approved today are the result of a recommendation from the architects after a diligent and thoughtful six-month study and design process that explored all options for the site. The analysis that we undertook was lengthy and rigorous, and ultimately led us to the determination that creating a new building on the site of the former American Folk Art Museum is the only way to achieve a fully integrated campus.