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

Architecture doesn’t need words; it stands on its own.  So when I saw the title of the current architecture show at MoMA posted outside the gallery, 9 + 1 Ways of Being Political: 50 Years of Political Stances in Architecture and Urban Design, I wanted to turn around and leave.  It sounded more like a PhD dissertation than a show, and promised little delight.

The exhibit, culled from artifacts in the musem’s permanent collection, is text heavy, like an exploded book.  Most of what’s on display describes speculative constructions and consists of drawings, collages, posters and pamphlets.  But those things on display — those actual, tactile, three-dimensional objects — are enchanting.  There’s a facade panel from the Ricola headquarters by Herzog & de Meuron, printed with the image of a single wildflower, that magically fuses elegance with kitsch.  And there are models that bring projects to life in a way that renderings and photographs simply cannot.  Foremost among these is a foot-high, laser-cut, clear acrylic massing model for a proposal to rebuild the World Trade Center by United Architects.  It’s a group of narrow towers, in staggered heights, that are becoming gently tangled up in one another.  Someone I know, a poet, says that the Twin Towers were lovers.  This model makes this notion that buildings harbor desire perfectly real.

World Trade Center Proposal, 2002, United Architects.

A young woman at the Cindy Sherman retrospective at MoMA missed the point rather badly, observing about the artist, “She’s pretty.  Why does she do all of this?”  Sherman has made a career of dressing up in costumes, makeup and wigs and then photographing herself.  One one level her project is about how superficial social identity is, and specifically about how women are so often called upon to be something that they’re essentially not.  But the seductive quality of her work makes it difficult to categorize simply as feminist or media art.  I look at these pictures and fall right into them.

It was stunning to see Sherman’s small black and white photographs from the late 1970’s, film stills, mounted together in groups.  When seen one-at-a-time in magazines and online, each one has a smart, iconic presence.  But when seen en masse their artifice is apparent, and it’s at odds with their poignancy.  The women pictured in them, observed without their knowledge, are psychically and physically vulnerable.  They fall into recognizable feminine archetypes (abandoned, ambitious, ruined, hunting) but also arouse sympathy.  (Sherman’s later works, when she’s disguised so elaborately or pointedly that no part of herself shows through, don’t have the same emotionalism.)  Sherman strikes an even finer balance between honesty and artifice in her color photographs from the early 1980’s, the rear projection series.  The washed-out stock image backdrops, and the absence of shadows connecting her figure to the scene, give them a special ambiguity.  These are alluringly incomplete tableaux, without a middle ground and without a simple explanation.  Who is this lady, where is she going, and what’s troubling her?  With simple means, the pictures harbor mysteries.

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.