Six weeks ago MoMA announced that it would raze the Tod Williams and Billie Tsien-designed building on West 53rd Street that originally housed the American Folk Art Museum (AFAM).  In its place MoMA wanted to build one to properly connect its existing building, just to the east, with the new Jean Nouvel-designed tower it’s building, just to the west.  Then last week MoMA announced that it was reconsidering.  Many had opposed the proposed demolition, including AFAM’s architects, architecture critics, and even MoMA’s Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, Barry Bergdoll.  But, if art critic Jerry Saltz’s commentary in New York Magazine is any indication, the art world is less concerned about it.  Saltz argues that the building served architecture far better than it served art, and supports its removal with a directness that approaches zeal.

It’s sad to see any building razed, especially one as architecturally ambitious and distinctive and AFAM, and one that’s only twelve years old.  Yet I’m unmoved about seeing it go.  AFAM sold the building to MoMA and left, and it occupies a key property within the MoMA campus.  From the outside the AFAM building has never felt like a part of midtown Manhattan.  Its signature super-tall bronze facade panels are uncomfortably overscaled — unrelated to the scale of surrounding facades — and, when seen from the sidewalk, have a dull, mottled surface that feels unfinished.  On an isolated site in the woods the building might cut a dramatic figure, a post-Brutalist megalith, but on a dense block in Midtown, rubbing shoulders with towers dressed in limestone and glass, it feels overly rugged, like a cocktail party guest in a parka.  Inside, the museum is spatially and sculpturally dynamic, but doesn’t carve out substantial spaces and surfaces for display.  Nearly half of each floor plate is given over to three staircases and an elevator.  Artworks are scattered all over the inner skin of the building, in corners and nooks and along stairwells, giving the place an eccentric, unorganized feeling.  My lack of sentimentality about razing AFAM is linked directly to my persistent nostalgia for the original, intimate MoMA building, which I remember, along with the installations of many of the individual artworks housed inside, from childhood.  After that building was swallowed up inside Yoshio Taniguchi’s 2004 expansion, I have little ardor left to preserve museum buildings, especially on this block.  MoMA has evolved as a corporate entity, amassing properties in midtown the way New York University does in Greenwich Village.  I didn’t flinch as I read in the Times that the AFAM building might be gone before the end of the year, but I did when I read that the MoMA board is currently chaired by Tishman Speyer head Jerry I. Speyer.  Museum leadership is running the place with a developer’s eye, designing a signature property rather than a temple for art.  It’s this same mentality that led to the construction of the AFAM building in the first place.  Let’s see if MoMA, in its upcoming expansion, can hit both marks.

Credit: © Peter Mauss | Esto

Among the snapshots my mother sent of her recent visit to Washington DC was one of the National Museum of the American Indian, which was under construction the last time I was at the Mall in 2001, for an anti-war rally, and that opened in 2004.  My first thought when I saw the photo was, Surely Native Americans deserve a better building than this.  It’s an ungainly mass with a banded facade that undulates, as the museum’s website explains, “evoking a wind-sculpted rock formation.”  In photographs the building looks less geological — like a form shaped molecule by molecule over eons — than Brutalism manque.  It’s composed with the kind of kooky eccentric language that’s fine for a small house, like those by Bruce Goff, but not for a monument meant to celebrate Native American cultures built by a government that very nearly eradicated them.  This bold, unsettled building just doesn’t feel right.

While the website text goes on to explain that the building and landscape were conceived with attention to Native American beliefs, the museum looks more like a testament to the formal willfulness of its designers, and entirely insensitive to any kind of belief.  (There are eleven firms credited with collaboration in the building’s design, including Polshek Partnership, who built the elegant, modernist Pequot Museum near Foxwoods Casino in Mashantucket, Connecticut.)  The next, and final, museum to be unveiled on the Mall will be the National Museum of African American Culture and History, which is rising now on the last available plot.  This building, designed by London-based architect David Adjaye, uses a language that’s mercifully unreferential.  Its flat planes and stark geometries confer dignity.

There are museums and then there is the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.  Even the names of its rooms make magic, like The Twenty-Column Hall, The Raphael Loggias, and The Blackamoor Dining-Room.  The galleries are so opulent that the collections of artwork they house, which are superb, might be beside the point.  This museum is an immense, multi-courtyarded complex that overlooks Plaza Square on one side and the Neva River on the other.  On the outside, it’s formidable, with an endless facade that’s been restored to a delicate tint of blue-green that evokes both sea and sky.

On the inside, particularly in those rooms that were originally part of the Romanovs’ Winter Palace, it’s decorated with fairytale splendor.  To visit the Hermitage is to move from one astoundingly furnished gallery to the next.  They are dressed with gilded and coffered and vaulted ceilings, tapestries and bas-reliefs, wood parquetry and tile mosaics, and chandeliers exploding with crystals.  There doesn’t seem to be any architecture present — every surface dissolves into ornament.  And the ornament is executed with such fineness that it’s never over-sweet; it all seems, somehow, entirely appropriate.  (The ornament seems, also, more Asian in spirit than European.)  The highlight might be St. George Hall, the room where the Romanovs held their coronations.  It’s finished in a frosted palette of blue and white, with gold accents that shimmer in the white daylight.  The museum’s astonishing interior design that offers a seamless dream of royal Russia.

How is a contemporary art museum different from any other kind of art museum?  And how is a museum different from any other kind of building?  Kiasma, the contemporary art gallery in Helsinki designed by Steven Holl, might be the perfect showcase for contemporary art.  Museums with similar programs, like PS1 and Mass MoCA, both adaptations of existing buildings, seem to have been designed primarily to accommodate the humongous scale of so much contemporary work, as well as an increased focus on sculpture and installations.  Kiasma has been designed to house the art, and delight visitors, in an array of galleries that are diverse in size, proportion and character.  The result is a warm, welcoming gallery for a kind of art that is, oftentimes, not.

The most surprising thing about the building is its gentleness.  Kiasma, which Holl won in a design competition, opened in 2008, at at time when he was regarded as a rock star in the United States.  Publicity photos showing the building’s sweeping interior ramp made the museum seem highly expressive, sculptural, and idiosyncratic — another signature work from another over-regarded post-postmodern architect.  But the building is astoundingly fluid; one moves through it effortlessly.  A great deal of this is due to the careful composition, scaled beautifully for the moving body and alert to the picturesque.  And a great deal of it is due to the judicious use of daylight, which is carried into the galleries through concealed windows and skylights.  It’s a wonderful place to see contemporary art and, probably, just about anything.

I’ve visited musuems that are brilliantly constructed and curated, but none whose artworks are as perfectly choreographed  — that is, perfectly laid out for display — as the Glyptoteket in Copenhagen.  This museum, which specializes in ancient and modern sculpture, is housed in a stately nineteenth-century building organized around a high, planted atrium.  (The museum’s collection of modern paintings is housed in a contemporary addition whose entrance is slipped so discretely inside that it’s difficult to find and navigate, all especially frustrating since that collection is so impressive.)

In the main building, each long, high gallery is painted a different strong, sober color, and lit from unobtrusive clerestories.  The smaller sculptures are gathered together on tables, and the larger sculptures are grouped together in vignettes, and all seem absolutely correct in their disposition.  Each sculpture is placed in just the right spot, facing just the right way, with just the right amount of free space around it.  This makes the museum virtually hypnotic to move through.  Most memorable is the installation of Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais at the end of one ground floor gallery.  Raised a few steps and set off with steely blue walls, the piece is exquisitely framed.  The figures, like most of Rodin’s, are scaled just a bit larger than life, so that they’re imposing without being monstrous.  The museum serves them magnificently; their power shines through.

Renzo Piano has become our go-to architect for museums.  He designed the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1977 with former partners Richard Rice and Richard Rogers and then, solo, the Menil Collection and additions to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the High Museum of Art.  The Pompidou Center is a singular piece of work, but the others are tasteful, intelligent and unobtrusive structures that generally stay out of the way of the artwork.  So nothing prepared me for the power of Piano’s addition to the Morgan Library, which opened in 2006 but I saw for the first time last week.  I’ve passed its discrete, metal-clad entrance on Madison Avenue countless times and simply walked on by, so unprepossessing did it seem from the sidewalk.

But the interior is commanding, a place where pristine cartesian space rules.  Piano’s addition, which serves as a lobby and cafe, connects three existing Morgan buildings, including the original Charles Mckim-designed museum from 1903.  Piano imagined the new building as a perfect cube and there’s a a geometric rigor in its details and construction as well as its proportions.  This modest glass box (it’s only about about eighteen feet high) gave me more pleasure than any other modern building I’ve visited in New York City.  My favorite parts are the framelesss glass elevator cabs (they’re also cubes) that rise and fall musically, and seemingly effortlessly, on exposed pistons.  American architects continually grumble that their clients prefer traditional styles and that their contractors can’t build finely.  This building shows otherwise.

A new play, Seven Homeless Mammoths Wander New England, takes the controversial closing of the Natural History Museum at Amherst College in 2001 as its subject.  That neat, brick box, called the Appleton Cabinet, was subsequently converted into luxe student dorms.  In the play the woolly mammoth skeletons that reside inside serve as emblems of historical time, personal evolution, and our own artfully-concealed yet always-stirring animal natures.  When I attended a reading of the play I had no real scientific knowledge of woolly mammoths and also a surprisingly clear image of them.  I pictured them as clumsy, plundering beasts that made their home in snowy nether regions.

What was missing from my vision were the animal’s most salient feature, their enormous, gravity-defying, corkscrew-twisted tusks.  Our images of woolly mammoths are fantasies, not so different in their speculation than our images of unicorns and mermaids.  In dioramas the woollies are typically depicted as friendly, hairy elephants, and in scientific illustrations as noble monsters.  My favorite image might be the skeletons themselves, which make them seem like big horses with fancy tusks.  It’s a happy fantasy.

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.

I swoon for Mr. Bates, I swoon for Lady Mary’s drop waist gowns, and I swoon for the house itself, Downton Abbey.  The show is filmed at Highclere Castle, the real-life home of the Earl and Countess of Carnarvon, a young couple who look alarmingly non-royal.  The current structure was built between 1838 to 1878 on an historic site that has been continuously occupied since the 800’s.  Like Downton, Highclere served as a hospital during WWI and, in the happier times before and after, as a venue for highly glamorous parties.  The house has neo-Gothic facades with a storm of crockets and finials disguising its hearty stone walls.  But its interiors, cavernous halls furnished with dark orientals and spindly tables and chairs, embody a restrained, anglophilic glamor.

An American equivalent might be the Henry Clay Frick mansion on Fifth Avenue in New York, which houses the Frick Collection.  This grand limestone house and its gardens fill and entire block above East 70th Street, yet still feel intimate, like a family’s home.  The rooms are finely scaled and spin off a skylit courtyard that’s a bit like Downton’s entry hall, although much smaller.  Just the room names themselves — Garden Court, West Gallery, Oval Room — conjure a finer life.  On a weekend afternoon the museum is filled with visitors plugged into their audio guides, focused so hard on the docent’s recorded voice that they’re inattentive to the stupendous artwork in front of them, including several iconic Vermeers and Rembrandts.  As I made my way through the galleries, rediscovering a Whistler here and an El Greco there, I felt an incredible sense of ease.  It could imagine that this place was still a house, and that it was entirely open to me.

Don’t fix what’s isn’t broken is my response to New York City’s plan to improve the plaza in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Philanthropist David H. Koch, who’s donating $60 million to finance the work, saw the refurbished fountains at Lincoln Center and then prodded the Met to do something about their “crummy” ones.  The new design, by Philadelphia-based landscape architects OLIN, replaces the long, low fountains at each side of the museum entrance with smaller square ones, and frames the two underused, street-level side entrances with stands of trees.  The plan of the project released to the Times has a hollow prettiness, filling the space with trees, cafe tables and umbrellas.  The amateurish quality of the drawing certainly doesn’t help.

The plaza, as it is, is a vibrant urban space.  On cold days, like today, there are groups of visitors gathered on the entrance steps, some waiting for others and some just sitting there.  On warm days it feels like a festival, the entire length of the plaza thick with artists, food vendors, tourist and park-goers.  On the final evening of the Alexander McQueen show last summer, just before midnight, lines of brilliantly turned-out scenesters and fashionistas snaked around the fountains for a final entry, a spectacle of crazy, urban glamor.  True, the fountains are dismal, and rarely offer anything beyond a burble.  But that only keeps the area clear for small children and dog walkers.  Why can’t the Met keep the plaza they’ve got, which works, and clean and light the fountain properly?  The two side entrances that the new plan highlights are awfully small.  To turn them into proper entrances will require significant architectural work (larger openings, windows, some interior replanning) and not just rows of flowering trees out front.  There’s something nice about leaving this monumental public plaza in this, the city’s toniest precinct, unadorned, rather than turning it into an open air food court.  The real magic, after all, happens after you step inside the building.