.. ... 1:::: .•.•.•.• ·1,.., .... .... ··.i·.·.-.· .•.•.. !•.·.·..· :..: .:.: .1:.: .:.: ·t·f·lP· 1·l·t·f·t ···• ..... .. ., .. ....... • • ~ t ffl't W H AT S H D UL D W E D D W I T H 2 Columbus Circle? FEW WORKS OF ARCHITECTURE HAVE BEEN MORE REVILED than 2 Columbus Circle, erected in New York City in 1964. Edward Durell Stone (whose credits include the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.) designed the I 10-story building for the heir to the A&P supermarket fortune, l Huntington Hartford, who wanted a space in which to display his extensive art collection. Thus was born the Huntington Hartford Gallery of Modern Art. Stone's creation was unabashedly ornate, the famous ground-floor arcade among its most striking features. Although these flourishes amused or puzzled some people, many critics of the building were merciless, including Ada Louise Huxtable, who famously likened the arches to a series of gigantic lollipops. After Hartford's museum left 2 Columbus Circle in 1969, several tenants came and went. Today the building is vacant and owned by the city. New York has now agreed to sell 2 Columbus Circle for $17 million to the Museum of Arts & Design. Before the museum moves in, there will be a reno• vation, overseen by architect Brad Cloepfil, that will essentially destroy Stone's famous facade. Though the National Trust placed 2 Columbus Circle on its 11 Most Endangered Historic Places list this year, the New York City Landmarks .. ,. Preservation Commission has argued that the building does not "possess a .. .,. special character or special historical or aesthetic interest or value as part of the .., ...... .... .I development, heritage, or cultural characteristics of the city; state, or nation." Does 2 Columbus Circle indeed lack these qualities? We put that question to essayist Phillip Lopate, architects Robert A.M. Stern and Theodore H.M. Prudon, and architectural historian and critic Witold Rybczynski. PHOTOGRAPHY BY FREDERICK CHARLES NovemberlDecember 2004 PRESERVATION 21 ---- by Robert A.M. Stern perversity in me to want to give the new museum a TWO COLUMBUS CIRCLE, A LANDMARK lN DISTRESS. MUST chance. It would have signaled my independence from be saved. That the building is imperiled might have something his domineering, rigorous aesthetic had I been able to 'to do with its equivocal, iconoclastic style: neither coolly min-: find Huntington Hartford's gallery unexpectedly imalist nor authoritatively traditional. New York City's Land• charming. But I couldn't. There was something exceed• marks Preservation Commission-which has continually ingly awkward about the way art shows were shoe• refused to hold hearings on the designation of the building as horned into that narrow building, and the windowless a landmark=seems unable to deal with such ambiguity, but then rooms, cut off from all natural light by the white• New Yorkers, of whom I am one, often fall apart when con• slabbed facade, felt grim. fronted with ambiguity. Two Columbus Circle is a forthright Permit me an even more personal and very possibly structure, filling its oddly shaped block in a convincing way, its irrelevant digression: I once went to Huntington Hart• glorious concave marble ford's apartment, escorting my sister, one of the many facade scooping up light and attractive young women whose acquaintance he had throwing it back upon the struck up, and who seemed to have a standing invitation great public space that is to drop by. Hartford exchanged some polite small talk Columbus Circle. with us, then absently wandered away, turning us over Edward Durell Stone to a servant, who made us excellent chicken salad sand• designed 2 Columbus Circle wiches. What struck me right away was the way Hart• at a fertile time when he, like ford's vast apartment had been decorated so imper• Philip Johnson, Paul sonally, so indifferently, like a Waldorf-Astoria hotel Rudolph, and others, was suite. It was the first time, if not the last, I would be challenging the prevailing shocked to discover that many of the wealthiest people modernism. Many of the live in what, to my mind, are uninspiring, frumpy envi• important buildings Stone ronments. For the moment, it confirmed my suspicion designed in the 1950s• that Huntington Hartford did not have much of an eye. including the United States As his taste in interior decoration, so his museum: Pavilion, built for the Brussels by. P.hiJJip Lop ate ... Going there had the musty air of paying one's respects to World's Fair in 1958, and the an elderly bore and sitting upright on an overstuffed couch. American embassy in New THERE IS MUCH TO BE SAID FOR THE ARGUMENT THAT AMERICA'S pilgrimages from our home in Brooklyn just to eavesdrop on Now there exists a plan to turn 2 Columbus Circle into Delhi-were triumphant if most-endangered buildings are works of postwar modernism, the conversation between Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's Lever the Museum of Arts & Design, meanwhile reconfiguring whimsical. In this regard, 2 especially those from the 1960s, structures that do not have the House and Mies van der Rohes Seagram Building, catty• (and improving) the facade. Bravo! The heady design by Columbus Circle was quite unlike other New York structures, pioneering, canonic heroism of early modernism and tend to be corner from each other on Park Avenue. We were equally Brad Cloepfil and his firm, Allied Works Architecture, such as Lever House and the Seagram Building, epitomes of underrated. Besides, all buildings, even bad ones, if allowed to enthralled when Eero Saarinen's CBS Building, known as Black seems eminently worth attempting. What counts for me orthodox postwar modernism. Those two buildings have been remain standing for generations, can become cherished mem• Rock, and Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum opened is that the scale of the building, which makes a nice coun• recently preserved. But why should we save only the orthodox, bers of the neighborhood, like dotty uncles at a family gather• in that same era. No one I knew, however, was enthusiastic terpoint to the statue of Columbus on the circle, will the easily comprehended, the abundantly clear? Two Columbus ing. Threats to extirpate them from the cityscape for something about Edward Durell Stone's white elephant on Columbus remain the same. Circle stands proudly outside the canon; it forces us to examine glitzier and hipper may strike some of us as tantamount to send• Circle. Call us snobs, but Stone seemed to us an uninspired hack Let me say one important thing about context. When its decorative flourishes multiple times and asks us to linger over ing the elders into the woods to die-as brutal violations of our best left to design insipidly decorous foreign embassies or 2 Columbus Circle first opened, it stood across from its quirks. memory of place and, hence, our identity. Washington, D.C., mausoleums masquerading as perform• another, more imposing white elephant, the New York Col• Some critics say that New York is short on world-class I Two Columbus Circle is by no means a total aberration: It ing arts complexes, not something for the vital heart of New iseum, built under the aegis of Robert Moses. Neither the buildings by world-class architects. Well, here is one that is full has the courage of its blandly chichi, cocktail-party convic• York City The building felt, from the start, out of step with the Coliseum nor the Huntington Hartford Gallery was good of ideas about site, image, history, and the freedom that comes !! tions, even a sort of predictive postmodernist charm. For bet• streetwise aesthetic. architecture, but at least the two buildings had a certain with modernity Transforming the building into the new home l ter or worse, we have come a long way from the early 1960s, It was difficult, I see now, for us to separate our lack of enthu• familial relationship to each other, and a' 60s look of offi• of the Museum of Arts & Design need not be done at the I when 2 Columbus Circle, adorned with halfhearted lollipops and siasm for the building's architecture from our antipathy toward cial, monumental, alabaster-cloaked money. Now that the expense of Stone's design. Can we not live in the present and porthole windows, seemed an affront to purist eyes. Still, I see its initial program: the housing of a mediocre art collection Coliseum has been torn down, replaced by the Time• work with the past? no reason to protect this clunker. belonging to a millionaire A&P heir, along with regularly Warner complex, a 21st-century glass-tower extravaganza, Philip Johnson famously said, "You cannot not know his• A little personal history may be in order here. The same year changing exhibits, all of which were intended to promote the the context has changed significantly. The little white tory." Our job is to preserve the best and most provocative bits the Huntington Hartford Gallery of Modern Art opened, alleged superiority of representational over nonobjective gallery has lost its big white sibling and looks bereft next to of our recent history, in which 2 Columbus Circle plays a 1964, I graduated from college. I was passionate about modern painting. Since my older brother was an abstract painter, he took all that jazzy, opportunistic glass. I say, time for a makeover. tremendously important part. architecture-my older brother Leonard and I used to make personal offense. I, his devoted acolyte, nevertheless had enough 22 PRESERVATION November1December 2004 Novemb erlDecentb er 2004 PRESERVATION 23 2 Columbus Circle 4-J/_ii.nlcl.Ry.b..c.Ly.IL&k.i_ _ __ __ __ '' by .Ihend nre H.,.M .Prudnn _ ARCHITECTURE MAY BE FOR THE AGES, BUT IT HAS ALWAYS : I been ruled by taste.