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  #1941  
Old Posted Apr 12, 2013, 3:28 PM
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I'm very much ambivalant about the folk art museum. I think the facade is great, and Williams/Tsien are shamefully underrepresented in their hometown (as is Steven Holl); but it isn't a great space for art and I am absolutely giddy about the prospect of an additional 50,000 square feet of seamless viewing space for a museum that has a gigantic amount of world-class art in storage.
     
     
  #1942  
Old Posted Apr 12, 2013, 6:31 PM
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Originally Posted by sbarn View Post
In your opinion. I work in the architecture field and a lot of people are very mad about this.
Well, obviously everyone's opinion is their own. But the vast majority of New Yorkers won't shed a single tear over the loss of this building. Most don't even know it exists.
It's no great loss, save for advertising for MOMA.



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  #1943  
Old Posted Apr 12, 2013, 6:40 PM
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Is that Baccarat rising to the right of the pic?

Apologies for the brief tangent.....
     
     
  #1944  
Old Posted Apr 12, 2013, 6:41 PM
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Is that Baccarat rising to the right of the pic?

Apologies for the brief tangent.....
Yep!
     
     
  #1945  
Old Posted Apr 12, 2013, 6:48 PM
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That's gonna be a Nice contrast in geometry. There are even closer visual similarities between the two that'll be keen to see developing.

But again...I *really* want to see a T.V. lighting scheme rendering just to see how it plays against what I've seen from Hotel B.
     
     
  #1946  
Old Posted Apr 12, 2013, 7:10 PM
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Originally Posted by NYguy View Post
Well, obviously everyone's opinion is their own. But the vast majority of New Yorkers won't shed a single tear over the loss of this building. Most don't even know it exists.
It's no great loss, save for advertising for MOMA.
I think you could leave it at that, there wasn't really a need to respond to my post. Since you did...

I do find it odd you believe you speak for the "vast majority" of New Yorkers. Most the reaction to articles related to the Folk Art Museum demo are overwhelmingly negative. Its odd that an art museum plans to demolish a building thats so heralded in the art and design community, showing that their interests lie with big business over the preservation of art. The Architects (Tod Williams + Billie Tsien) won numerous awards for the Museum's design, like the Municipal Art Society New York City Masterwork Award (in 2001), the American Institute of Architects (AIA) National Honor Award, the World Architecture Awards for Best Building in the World, Best Public/Cultural Building in the World, and Best North American Building, as well as the New York City American Institute of Architects Design Award (all in 2003). It may be small, but its much more than a billboard for MoMA than you suggest.
     
     
  #1947  
Old Posted Apr 12, 2013, 10:45 PM
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Originally Posted by sbarn View Post
Most the reaction to articles related to the Folk Art Museum demo are overwhelmingly negative.
Of course they would be. Where do you think those opinions are coming from? I hope you don't think its the average man on the street.

The building hasn't been around long enough for anyone to become so attached. The mock outrage over it's demise is hillarious. Anyone who claims to be outraged should save it for something much more genuine and deserving of it. Maybe they'll save the façade and move it somewhere else for those people to look at.


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  #1948  
Old Posted Apr 12, 2013, 11:07 PM
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Originally Posted by NYguy View Post
Of course they would be. Where do you think those opinions are coming from? I hope you don't think its the average man on the street.

The building hasn't been around long enough for anyone to become so attached. The mock outrage over it's demise is hillarious. Anyone who claims to be outraged should save it for something much more genuine and deserving of it. Maybe they'll save the façade and move it somewhere else for those people to look at.
What do you mean "mock outrage"? Just because you don't agree with it doesn't mean it isn't real... You really shouldn't be so dismissive of other people's opinions.

The irony is, MoMA was the first American museum to establish a department of architecture and design. Now they plan to destroy a building that is highly regarded in the world of architecture and design. It is essentially akin to destroying a piece of modern art that lies within the Museum itself. Curbed did a rundown of people's reactions today.

I like skyscrapers as much as anyone here, but I also like good architecture. I find it sad that a more creative solution couldn't have been found.


Architecture Magazine
     
     
  #1949  
Old Posted Apr 14, 2013, 8:29 PM
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Originally Posted by sbarn View Post
What do you mean "mock outrage"? Just because you don't agree with it doesn't mean it isn't real.
Well, you are right about that. In Manhattan, the disconnection some people have with reality knows no bounds. If someone decided to chop a tree down on that block, there would be just as much outrage.

Sympathy denied....


But I will throw you a bone. It will never happen, but what if MOMA was somehow able to install the façade inside the expansion somewhere...

Tai Pan of HK









I have no strong feelings for it either way, but if MOMA must tear it down, so be it. I still say it's no great loss for the City. Meanwhile, opinions differ on the building itself.


http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog...act-vandalism/

MoMA’s Act of Vandalism





Martin Filler
April 12, 2013

Quote:
The only surprising thing about the Museum of Modern Art’s long-anticipated announcement that it will demolish Tod Williams and Billie Tsien’s Museum of American Folk Art building of 1997–2001, an architectural gem that abuts the MoMA campus on Manhattan’s West 53rd Street, is that this deplorable decision took so long to occur. When in 2011 the American Folk Art Museum was compelled to sell the decade-old building to its next-door neighbor—because the worldwide economic crash had caused it to default on $32 million in bonds used to finance the $18.4-million structure—some commentators sanctimoniously portrayed the debacle as the comeuppance of a quirky little institution’s overweening ambition.

Williams and Tsien’s physically small (a mere forty feet wide and eighty-five feet high) but architecturally significant incursion into MoMA’s presumed turf has long been known to be a thorn in the side of Glenn D. Lowry, the Modern’s director since 1995, and it has seemed something of a grudge match from the outset. Years before Lowry’s tenure and the Drang nach Westen he is so closely associated with, the Modern’s endlessly munificent benefactor Blanchette Rockefeller had deeded two narrow townhouses further down West 53rd Street to the fledgling Museum of American Folk Art (as it was then called). She could never have imagined how keenly MoMA would come to rue her well-intentioned gift.



http://www.vulture.com/2013/04/saltz...rt-museum.html

Saltz on MoMA’s Plan to Raze the Folk Art Museum: Good! Build Something That Has Room for Art





By Jerry Saltz
April 12, 2013


Quote:

How sad. Just twelve years after it was built on W. 53rd Street next to MoMA, the former American Folk Art Museum is going to be torn down by its new owner: MoMA. What’s sad is not that the building is going; it’s that, despite near-universal rave reviews for its architecture, it was doomed to death as an art museum from the beginning. As soon as the Tod Williams and Billie Tsien–designed building opened, it was obvious to anyone interested in it primarily as a museum that the interior spaces were absolutely unusable for the purpose of showing art. The galleries were cramped and the interior was filled with staircases, which were sometimes accompanied by corridorlike spaces and other awkward nooks for art.


When the Museum announced two years ago that it was moving back to the darkened lobby space it occupied before this disastrous turn of events, I ventured that MoMA, despite its own checkered record in building interior spaces for exhibiting art, should raze this building and start again. As soon as MoMA announced exactly this on Wednesday, the pushback was incensed. Furious lovers of the building took to the New York Times comment boxes to lambast the “excruciatingly poor decisions museum directors are making. My good friend and esteemed New York architecture critic Justin Davidson wrote an article charging that "if the museum's (MoMA's) architects can't figure out a way to use Williams and Tsien's ingenious stack of rooms, that is a failure of imagination."

The argument for keeping the building intact is that MoMA should show works that will fit there — small pieces like drawings, photographs, or design. But scale is not the problem with the American Folk Art Museum. The problem is that it contains no usable spaces to show art, whether it be large, small, flat, or three-dimensional. Moreover, keeping the building would not address MoMA's own tragedy, which is that despite spending nearly a billion dollars on its renovation, it completely failed to build enough room for its vaunted permanent collection of painting and sculpture. The museum has been totally hamstrung and hurt by this failure of vision since its 2004 reopening. What MoMA needs more than anything is more properly scaled contiguous space for this singular collection. The boxy walled building of Williams-Tsien is sadly not that space.

The problem all along is that this building has been looked at not as a space for art but as an idea of an art museum. Never mind that visiting work there would likely involve a non-contiguous route from MoMA’s main buidling. Try to imagine only one gallery of MoMA's work — say the great gallery of eight Jackson Pollock paintings, or Monet’s “Water Lilies,” which already look fairly crappy at MoMA — hanging anywhere in the Williams-Tsien building other than the stone entry atrium. Put any of MoMA’s art in that building and it will die. And certainly contemporary art does not work there. Even granting that the Williams-Tsien facade is singular (I once compared it to a Kleenex box), the proponents of this building love it as an abstract ideal of a space for art, a platonic thing apart, a fetish.

This is among the most tragic chapters in New York museum architecture I have ever seen. The doleful truth is that no one wants to be right about something this painful. I understand the bitter reaction of architects and architecture critics to the news, but they should know that virtually every person in the art world believes that the Williams-Tsien building is a terrible place to look at art — and that it is just one of a spate of new museum buildings that put architecture before art since Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao. Architects: When you design an art museum, do whatever you like to the outside of your building. But please, create enough well-proportioned interior space to show art in. Art first; all else will follow.
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  #1950  
Old Posted Apr 15, 2013, 12:19 AM
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Yes, the destruction of Penn Station was a travesty, but this little facade? It's not worth the tears.... Onward and upward
-----If you want to see Williams and Tsien----go to the Barnes Museum in Philadelphia. And remember, this is Manhattan.
     
     
  #1951  
Old Posted Apr 21, 2013, 2:02 AM
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Tower Verre

I really hope this project starts soon. I think the project still can be built!!
     
     
  #1952  
Old Posted Apr 23, 2013, 6:00 PM
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  #1953  
Old Posted May 3, 2013, 10:59 PM
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Temporary space going up...


(May 3, 2013)






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  #1954  
Old Posted May 10, 2013, 12:04 AM
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A lifeline thrown to the former Folk Art Museum...

http://archpaper.com/news/articles.asp?id=6642

Quote:
Amid a firestorm of controversy surrounding the planned demolition of the Tod Williams Billie Tsien-designed American Folk Art Museum (AFAM) building, the Museum of Modern Art, which purchased the Folk Art building, announced today that it has selected Diller Scofidio + Renfro to plan the future of the site. The firm will take on the task of connecting the Yoshio Taniguchi-designed MoMA building to a new tower designed by Jean Nouvel.

In a statement, Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) indicated the possibility that the Folk Art Museum building could be retained as a part of their project.

“DS+R has exhibited within MoMA's walls since 1989 and now we've been invited to rethink the museum's walls. This is a complex project that also involves issues of urban interface, concerns that are central to our studio. We have asked MoMA, and they have agreed, to allow us the time and flexibility to explore a full range of programmatic, spatial, and urban options. These possibilities include, but are not limited to, integrating the former American Folk Art Museum building, designed by our friends and admired colleagues, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien.”
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  #1955  
Old Posted May 17, 2013, 2:03 AM
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( May 16, 2013 )


The Rain Room sits on our lovely spot for the time being...















Meanwhile, opinions continue to rage on the fate of the Folk Museum...

http://therealdeal.com/blog/2013/05/...ecture-review/

Tear the American Folk Art Museum down!: Architecture review





May 16, 2013
By James Gardner


Quote:
The architectural cause célèbre of the past few weeks has surely been the fate of the former American Folk Art Museum, which opened in 2001 and was designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. Located at 45 West 53rd Street, the unoccupied building sits on land that the Museum of Modern Art has purchased in order to expand even further toward Sixth Avenue. When MoMA announced its plans to raze the structure, many in the architectural community were up in arms. Just this week, the New York Times’s architecture critic, Michael Kimmelman, gave full-throated expression to this conviction in a front page story headlined, “Defending a Scrap of Soul Against MoMA.”

For some, the clash between this tiny building and the corporate museum next door recalls the battle between David and Goliath — if not a meeting of Bambi and Godzilla. Obviously the building must, in the name of architecture itself, be preserved! (Let me say in passing that it never ceases to amaze me how admirably high-minded New Yorkers are when it comes to other people’s property.)

Perhaps you saw, a few days back, the video of that “ice tsunami” on a lake in Minnesota that bizarrely crept from the water onto the land, mercilessly crushing any structure in its path. A perfect metaphor, it would seem, for the relentless westward expansion of MoMA. And yet, MoMA may have a soul after all. Before announcing the demise of the Folk Art Museum, the museum’s director, Glenn Lowry — doubtless concerned about a possible public relations disaster — personally visited Williams and Tsien to hold their hands and help them through the difficult days ahead.

In the interests of balance, however, I offer up this slightly more nuanced assessment of the building in question: Tear it down!

The façade, which frankly plagiarizes Christian de Portzamparc’s overrated LVMH Tower at 19 East 57th Street, is an ugly brown mediocrity that, from the day it opened, was as dysfunctional as it was ungainly. Occupying a tiny site originally meant for a row house, its interior was all circulation core — elevators and stairs — and almost no space for galleries. And in order to pull off the clumsy, value-engineered façade, the architects and the museum shut out almost all of the natural light that might have entered the space.
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  #1956  
Old Posted May 17, 2013, 1:08 PM
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Even when I kind-of agree with him, James Gardner's writing is like nails on a chalkboard to me. He is an odious human being.
     
     
  #1957  
Old Posted Jun 25, 2013, 9:54 PM
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  #1958  
Old Posted Jun 25, 2013, 10:57 PM
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Originally Posted by NYguy View Post
Back to filing permits...

...and lining up the funding

From WSJ (I subscribe, but this is behind the WSJ paywall, fair use quote)

A Singapore real estate family and a group of Asian banks are in advanced discussions with developer Hines to revive a stalled luxury condo development next to Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art, according to people familiar with the negotiations.

The Kwee family is considering a $300 million equity investment in the metal and glass tower designed by Pritzker prize winner Jean Nouvel. Singapore’s United Overseas Bank U11.SG +1.29% and other lenders are in discussions to make up to $800 million in construction loans, these people said.
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  #1959  
Old Posted Jun 25, 2013, 11:58 PM
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The article link:

Hines in Talks With Singapore Group to Finance Manhattan Tower

The permits are for the standpipe and sprinkler system, which is the first utility to be installed.
     
     
  #1960  
Old Posted Jun 26, 2013, 12:35 PM
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^ Yes, this is great news indeed! First we learn of some possible financing of the Nordstrom tower and now this. There are so many high profile towers in the city that could be under construction next year, I don't know if I'll be able to contain my excitement.


http://www.nasdaq.com/article/hines-...20130625-00937

Hines in Talks with Singapore Group on NYC Skyscraper


By Dow Jones Business News
June 25, 2013


Quote:
A Singapore real-estate family and a group of Asian banks are in advanced discussions with developer Hines to revive a stalled luxury condo development next to Manhattan'sMuseum of Modern Art, according to people familiar with the negotiations.

The Kwee family is considering a $300 million equity investment in the metal and glass tower designed by Pritzker prize winner Jean Nouvel. Singapore'sUnited Overseas Bank and other lenders are in discussions to make up to $800 million in construction loans, these people said.

Representatives for Hines, the Kwee family and United Overseas Bank declined to comment.

An agreement with the Asian group would breathe new life into a highly anticipated project that was shelved when the downturn hit. In 2007, Hines unveiled plans for the building connected to the museum.

But the tapering tower had been largely stuck in limbo until talks began several months ago with the Asian investors. Known as Tower Verre, the building located next to the museum is slated to include additional museum gallery space at the base. Most of the rest would be luxury condos.

Hines acquired the lot next to the museum for $125 million in 2007 and agreed to a mixed-use building. Later that year, the Houston-based developer unveiled a 1,250-foot-tall tower that was high enough to see eye-to-eye with the roof of the Empire State Building, and included the possibility of a five-star hotel.

The economic downturn slowed the project's progress, and it suffered another setback in 2009 when the New York City Planning Commission instructed the developers to reduce the height by 200 feet. Mr. Nouvel offered a new, shorter design that won city approval, but the project remained stalled while Hines looked for financing in a difficult market for large construction projects.

Talks with the Kwee family and Asian banks began last year, say people with knowledge of the discussions. The family is one of the wealthiest in Singapore and one of the city-state's largest landlords. It owns Pontiac Land, a privately held developer and hotel operator. Forbes recently put the Kwee family wealth at $4.6 billion.
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