2 Columbus Circle – Preservation vs. Makeover

2 Columbus Circle (Before & After)

History of 2 Columbus Circle

2 Columbus Circle is a 12-story, 420-foot-tall building located on the south side of Columbus Circle on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, New York City. Opened in 1964 after A&P heir Huntington Hartford hired architect Edward Durrell Stone to build a museum for him at the site, the building came under controversy after the Museum Of Arts & Design (MAD) was designated as the building’s developer. MAD subsequently significantly altered its design, including modifying its facade; since 1996, ideas had been put forward for the building to be land-marked, so its proposed landmark status was brought into question with this renovation.

Two Columbus Circle opened as the Gallery of Modern Art, displaying Hartford’s collection. This was a 12-story modernist structure, designed by Stone for Hartford, to display his art collection. As Stone designed it, the building was marble-clad with Venetian motifs and a curved façade. It had filigree-like portholes and windows that ran along an upper loggia at its top stories. The building was often called “The Lollipop Building” in reference to a mocking review by architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable in which she called it a “die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops.” However, three decades later she admitted that she got “a little lift, a sense of pleasure” when she walked past it. Nonetheless, Huxtable took issue with the campaign to save the building, writing in the Wall Street Journal that: “It was an unworthy performance that did little credit to anyone who cares about preservation and can only serve as an object lesson of how not to go about it.”

By 1969, the Gallery of Modern Art closed. Farleigh Dickinson University received 2 Columbus Circle as a gift from Hartford and operated it as the New York Cultural Center, where art exhibitions were sometimes hosted. Six years later, Gulf and Western Industries purchased 2 Columbus Circle. In exchange for tax breaks, Sumner Redstone got a clause that Hartford had, which said that the building could never be renovated or destroyed. The building went unused until 1980, when Gulf and Western presented 2 Columbus Circle to the City of New York as a gift. The City of New York accepted 2 Columbus Circle and installed the headquarters for the Department of Cultural Affairs. The New York Convention and Visitors Bureau also started being housed in 2 Columbus Circle.

Museum of Arts and Design Renovation

Interest in land-marking this building began in 1996, soon after the building turned thirty years old and became eligible for landmark designation. In this year, Robert A.M. Stern included it in his article ” A Preservationist’s List of 35 Modern Landmarks-in-Waiting” written for the New York Times Stone’s design at 2 Columbus Circle was listed as one of the World Monument Fund’s “100 Most Endangered Sites for 2006.” The same year, Jennifer Raab, Chairman of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, reviewed with the Designation Committee of the Commission the possibility of recommending a hearing on 2 Columbus Circle. In 1998, the Department of Cultural Affairs and the Convention and Visitors Bureau vacated 2 Columbus Circle, and in 2002, the Landmarks Preservation Commission Designation Committee reviewed the request to hold a hearing and again voted not to. MAD was designated as the site developer of 2 Columbus Circle by the New York City Economic Development Corporation in June 2002. In 2004, the National Trust for Historic Preservation called it one of America’s “11 Most Endangered Historic Places.” Despite a serious preservation effort, the New York City Department of Buildings approved the permit for MAD to begin removing 2 Columbus Circle’s facade.

The museum’s plans to radically alter the building’s original design touched off a preservation battle involving many notable people. Architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff named the new building as one of seven structures in New York City that should be torn down because they “have a traumatic effect on the city.”

By the end of renovations in 2008, the museum moved to this building. The new location at 2 Columbus Circle, with more than 54,000 square feet, more than tripled the size of the Museum’s former space. It includes four floors of exhibition galleries for works by established and emerging artists; a 150-seat auditorium in which the museum plans to feature lectures, films, and performances; and a restaurant.

Ada Louise Huxtable’s take on 2 Columbus Circle

Once again I turn to Pulitzer Prize winning architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable who sums up this campaign of Historic Preservation vs. Renovation in her Wall Street Journal article: The Best Way to Preserve 2 Columbus Circle? A Makeover.
By Ada Louise Huxtable – Architecture Critic – Wall Street Journal Jan. 7, 2004  New York. Ms. Huxtable had been a major force in advocating for Historic Preservation, but on this building she disagreed.

Ms. Huxtable used the campaign to save 2 Columbus Circle to argue that an intransigent approach to preservation is not beneficial. “One wonders at what point New York’s civic groups lost their vision, just when they decided nostalgia and trendy revisionism overrode a positive contribution to the city’s cultural and architectural quality.” This campaign in particular led Ms. Huxtable to write about negative aspects of preservation. She pointed out the existence and problem of preservation for the sake of preservation. “There is a great deal more at stake than this one building. When preservation distorts history and reality in a campaign of surprising savagery, it signals an absence of standards and an abdication of judgment and responsibility. It has lost its meaning when we prefer a stagnant status quo.” She fought against preserving the facade: “Inspection has found the facade so badly deteriorated that it can’t be saved; it would have to be rebuilt—a copy or reproduction would have to replace it.” The campaign to save 2 Columbus Circle was ultimately unsuccessful.

The Best Way to Preserve 2 Columbus Circle? A Makeover.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB107344578910162500

By Ada Louise Huxtable

Wall Street Journal – Updated Jan. 7, 2004 12:03 a.m. ET – New York

I have been watching, with wonder and disbelief, the beatification of 2 Columbus Circle, ne the Huntington Hartford Museum, a k a the lollipop building (so-named, for better or worse, by me). This small oddity of dubious architectural distinction, designed by Edward Durell Stone, has been elevated to masterpiece status and cosmic significance by a campaign to save its marginally important, mildly eccentric, and badly deteriorated facade — a campaign that has escalated into a win-at-any-cost-and-by-any-means vendetta in the name of “preservation.”

Never has that term been so taken in vain. The opposition to the renovation of this derelict little building with an uncertain future as the new home of the Museum of Arts and Design (formerly the American Crafts Museum) seems to be operating by tunnel vision and a blind resistance to change. What is conspicuously missing from the orchestrated hysteria that has replaced rational debate about 2 Columbus Circle is any desire to see or understand the plans for the building’s conversion before going into attack mode. For those fixated on saving the existing facade, that is simply not an option.

The architect of the conversion, Brad Cloepfil, of Allied Works Architecture, reports that he has not received a single call or inquiry from anyone writing the impassioned pieces that have flooded the press, which appears to have abandoned the idea of fact checking or a balanced point of view. There is enough irresponsibility to go around. Few have seen the version of the evolving design now receiving city review. Any civic or architectural virtues it may possess are irrelevant. The facts would only spoil a good fight.

The most basic preservation question is not being asked at all. What will be lost, and what will be gained? The proposal being rejected out of hand is a promising solution by a talented young American practitioner that will reclaim an abandoned building of debatable merit for a desirable cultural facility. We do not lose the building; everything that is good about it will be retained — its size, its scale, and its intimate relationship to the street. Although three stories could be added legally, the decision was made to change nothing about its iconic form and presence.

What is bad about the building — the dark, cramped and virtually useless interior and those faux harem walls that close off spectacular views — will be changed. Yes, we will lose the facade, and the new one will not offer the instant appeal of exotic kitsch; it is a restrained, expressive reflection of an unusual way of using the concrete frame to open the building visually, inside and out. It is hard not to see this as a trade-off worth making.

I have studied the design carefully, and I have also visited Columbus Circle, which is in the process of a long-delayed rebuilding and revitalization. The city’s most notorious traffic circle, a survival challenge of Jersey barriers, is coming into focus, and the surprise is that it is going to be wonderful. The immense, nearly complete AOL Time Warner Center on its west side, by David Childs, of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, totally eclipses Donald Trump’s hotel and residential tower on the north, an alienated Central Park has been refurbished and re-embraced to the east, and a landscaped surround for the traffic-impacted Columbus statue in the middle is under way. Columbus finally stands tall, and even the Maine Memorial looks grand. Think — sort of — Trafalgar Square.

The AOL Time Warner Center is exactly what a New York skyscraper should be — a soaring, shining, glamorous affirmation of the city’s reach and power, and its best real architecture in a long time. Its two tall towers rise from symmetrical lower sections rotated in a bow to the Circle, where the huge building morphs into pedestrian shops and restaurants at ground level. But the wonder is the delicacy, the elegance, of these perfectly calibrated, glittering glass facades, the suave, sharp-edged precision that is amazingly subtle and refined for a structure of this enormous size.

The Building’s New Look

Seen against AOL Time Warner’s astonishing and unexpected beauty, the shabby little punchboard facade of 2 Columbus Circle sticks out like a small, sore thumb. It didn’t seem so bad before, but the sophisticated finesse of Mr. Childs’s first-rate building makes it look like the second-rate building that it really is. Its retro mannerisms are suddenly crude caricatures.

Because Brad Cloepfil is also an architect who designs with a precise delicacy, the new look for 2 Columbus Circle works in this setting. The building’s enrichment will be its facade of terra-cotta panels, the texture and tone of the tiles to be developed in collaboration with an artist, in keeping with the museum’s crafts tradition. But the exterior is only part of the story; it is integral to a far more radical, three-dimensional concept that is virtually impossible to understand from pictures — a system of cuts into the concrete structure starting on the outside walls and carried inside on the floors and ceilings to the building’s core that create a continuous sense of space.

Exterior vertical and horizontal bands in a linear pattern provide daylight for the galleries and outside views. They connect to interior slits that open ceilings and floors to slotted glimpses of other spaces and galleries above and below. As one approaches, the building’s solidity will give way to layered transparencies, from terra-cotta screens to large areas of fritted, or patterned, glass at the top, with glimpses of galleries near street level.

But let us assume for argument’s sake that none of this matters; that the facade should be saved even if everything else about the building remains unresolved. Structural studies made in the heat of battle are suspect; I’ve been through too many cooked reports to believe them. However, some facts, although unwelcome, are incontrovertible. Inspection has found the facade so badly deteriorated that it can’t be saved; it would have to be rebuilt — a copy or reproduction would have to replace it.

The metal shims — pieces of metal attached behind each piece of marble to level the stones — have rusted as water got into the joints, and the damage has spread to the marble, which has cracked and spalled. Because the entire facade is affected, all of the rusted shims would have to be replaced and new marble cut and installed. There is no way it can be repaired. Nothing less than a Sansovino survival would justify an expensive replica, and only as a last resort for a rare artifact of the Venetian Renaissance, but a Sansovino facade this is not.

The necessity of constructing a vapor barrier for humidity control around the building — all museums require them — complicates things further. This is done on the exterior, although landmark buildings have been retrofitted inside at great cost and with extreme difficulty. We begin to get into a Catch-22 dilemma when a vapor barrier cannot be installed under a damaged facade, the preservation of which is debatable in the first place, and cost and space restrictions foreclose doing it inside.

What I find most personally disturbing, however, is the manipulated and manufactured history that has accompanied the demand for landmark status for a building already denied designation — and let’s forget those paranoid ideas about political plots and underhanded deals that always surface when things get hot. I marvel at the spin that is being put on both the building and its architect, Ed Stone, to reposition them in a mythical past. I don’t have to invent history; I was there.

Actually, there were two Ed Stones, the good one and the bad one, architecturally speaking. The first was Edward D. Stone, a talented practitioner of the International Style, and the architect, with Philip Goodwin, of the landmark building for the Museum of Modern Art, a charming man who frequented the better clubs and watering holes to the eventual disruption of his career. For a while, his life fell apart. Then it came together again with the help of a new wife and helpmeet, who informed me that he was to be referred to, henceforth, in anything I wrote, as Edward Durell Stone. Thus began the new persona and second career of Edward Durell Stone.

Mr. Stone’s Seraglio Period

This second phase was his better-known seraglio period, which coincided with the start of a State Department program for new U.S. embassies abroad. The program stressed the hiring of architects for reasons other than their political connections and specified that these buildings should not be brash interlopers, but that each should be designed to reflect or respect the particular country’s culture. This well-meant, but somewhat shallow and patronizing idea led to curious architectural acrobatics; the buildings strained to incorporate something “native” in their forms, and the strain shows. The significance of the program in Mr. Stone’s work has been explained by Laurie Kerr on this page — it is the only real history we have been given.

There was one outstanding success — Edward Durell Stone’s American Embassy in New Delhi, an enchanted place of fountains, arcades and screens that achieved immediate fame. He was besieged with commissions and he obliged — with screens. His clients couldn’t get enough of them, and they conveniently covered everything he built. What they covered was often not very good, but it was very popular, culminating in Washington’s most vacuous marble monument, the Kennedy Center. Mr. Stone’s pierced and arcaded facades became his signature gimmick, a crowd pleaser that never rose much above mediocrity; to those who knew his earlier work, this was all downhill. Along the way he built 2 Columbus Circle, which had a certain toylike charm.

Some profess to see its palazzo pretensions as a forerunner of postmodernism. I find that a stretch. You could say that anything like the State Department’s Foreign Buildings program was a step on the way to the liberation of architecture from the shackles of the functionalism and antihistoricism of the modern movement. But the overseas embassy program soon succumbed to the government’s pendulum swing between patronage and periodic attempts to upgrade, and significant change occurred only after the silly season of postmodernism had passed. At best, 2 Columbus Circle is memorably idiosyncratic.

One wonders at what point New York’s civic groups lost their vision, just when they decided nostalgia and trendy revisionism overrode a positive contribution to the city’s cultural and architectural quality. In St. Louis, Brad Cloepfil has just completed a fine small museum that successfully shares a plaza with Tadao Ando’s Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in the revitalization of an older area. The news does not seem to have traveled as far as New York.

There is a great deal more at stake than this one building. When preservation distorts history and reality in a campaign of surprising savagery, it signals an absence of standards and an abdication of judgment and responsibility. It has lost its meaning when we prefer a stagnant status quo.

Ms. Huxtable, the Journal’s architecture critic, last wrote on Jorn Utzon and Frank Gehry.