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Posts tagged Edward Durell Stone

Mar 6

The old Philip Goodwin- and Edward Durell Stone-designed MoMA was my first museum. I visited from high school through college and can still dream-walk my way through, conjuring many of the famous works in exactly the spots where they were displayed. When it reopened in 2004, after a highly sophisticated expansion by Yoshio Taniguchi, I couldn’t bear the bigger, noisier place, with its airport terminal acoustics, listless crowds, and enormous, empty central hall, the Marron Atrium. I stayed away, mostly. Now, eight years later, I’ve come around.

What happened? I stopped thinking of the place as one museum but as many museums, all glued together by that court. Last week, with limited time, I ran inside to see one specific exhibit and then back out again. As I was riding down the escalators I realized that the museum was like an airport terminal, a good one, leading a visitor to and from one gallery, and not necessarily through all of its galleries at once. Seeing the new, expanded MoMA requires strategy; you go to the sixth floor to see the blockbuster, to the third floor to see design, or to the fourth or fifth floors to browse the permanent collection. The place can’t be taken it all at once, as the older MoMA might have been. Before leaving I walked through the court, where there was some sort of politically-charged sculptural installation, and luxuriated in the great, fat void that it cuts, perversely, through the middle of the museum and the middle of midtown. After Marina Abramowic’ performance and then Yoko Ono’s installation there last year, that space has a history of its own; it reverberates. In 2005, MoMA mounted an exhibit of Tanagachi’s work called Nine Museums. That might be a perfect title for the current museum.

Dec 23

My first toehold in New York City was a summer internship during college at the public art gallery operated by the Department of Cultural Affairs. Both the Department and the gallery were housed at 2 Columbus Circle, the famous Edward Durell Stone building at the southwest corner of Central Park. It was built as a private museum in 1965, acquired by the city 1980, and then, with some controversy, sold in 2005 and renovated to house the Museum of Art and Design. For three months I sat at a desk on a narrow, cluttered balcony on the eighth floor, whose only ventilation and natural light was admitted through plate-sized portholes at the corners. I inspected sheets of slides submitted by artists and wrote rejection letters explaining that while their work was very, very good, we just wouldn’t be able to show it at the gallery. It was a job I was good at. And the great, ostentatious interior gave my endeavors a whiff of artistic authenticity. I wasn’t sure if the building was good, but I knew that it was architecture.

Last month I heard Hicks Stone, Edward Durell Stone’s son, speak about his father, who’s work he’s just commemorated in a monograph. Hicks is an architect too, and took great pains to compare his father’s work, building by building, to the work of more celebrated contemporaries like Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright. Hicks was trying to legitimize his father’s work, which was considered too ornamental, too excessive, and just too bizarre to be part of the modern canon. While Hick’s efforts are poignant they’re disappointing, because he’s not looking entirely clearly at his father’s work. Right now, when we’re all mindlessly nostalgic about mid-century modernism, might be the perfect moment to look back at Stone’s work, which challenges the proprieties of High Modernism. Herbert Muschamp (who has unpacked the history of the building brilliantly) relates 2 Columbus Circle to the Venetian Gothic and to Ruskin. Whatever it’s fundamental failings (like lack of light and air), the structure has got drama and glamor in spades. It’s ultra-modern and also highly artistic. Thirty years ago Tom Wolfe, in From Bauhaus to Our House, upheld Stone as a great modern American architect who didn’t get his due. That’s still true.