It's a MAD MAD World

Museum of Arts and Design, Allied Works Architecture/PHOTO: Museum of Arts and Design — David Heald

I'm back up and running — literally, I've passed through four airports in the last 96 hours. (Note to self — write anguished blogpost about continuing shortcomings of airport design.) Meanwhile, in New York, the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) re-opens to the public this weekend in its new home on Columbus Circle.

To recap: the new museum was at the center of a famous preservation battle a few years ago, because it would, and did, replace a building by the eccentric Modernist Edward Durrell Stone. I've written about my problems with that a few times so I won't repeat myself here. Last fall I toured through the construction site with the architect, Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture, and a few weeks ago I went through the nearly completed project with MAD Director Holly Hotchner. As it was reaching completion this summer my constant impression was that Cloepfil's building was a ghostly recollection of Stone's. Cloepfil had closely retained the proportions of Stone's museum, its footprint, its curving facade and something like its white color. Ada Louise Huxtable famously described the earlier building as a "die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops" and Cloepfil even kept the lower portions of those lollipops, which are now incorporated at the lobby level. It's as though he had dropped a paper lantern skin over Stone's framework.

Paper, Stone...where's the scissors? Well, Cloepfil cut an original fenestration pattern across his new building, an irregular circuitry of two-foot wide windows that form meandering Pac-Man channels across his facade. When you're inside, the same paths sometimes cut across floors. And the skin, which was white marble on Stone's building, is now made of white terra cotta tiles that in some light give off a mild iridescence and at other times look like nothing so much as the glazed bricks of the "white brick" apartment buildings that sprang up all around Manhattan's East Side in the 1950s and early '60s.

Stone's building also had an upper-story loggia that punched a void into its otherwise boxy form. Cloepfil has two wide glass stripes on the front facade but up top, where Stone's loggia used to be, there's now a long glass wall to provide the new museum's restaurant with views out over Columbus Circle and Central Park. The views will be irresistable, but that long glass wall connects Cloepfil's vertical glass panels to make an unmistakable "H" across the front of the building, as though the place has been branded by Hilton. As Paul Goldberger mentioned in The New Yorker a few weeks ago, Cloepfil is not capital "H" happy about that.

The interior spaces are more gratifying. In the lobby, to the left of the elevator banks, a steel and wood staircase is contained within a space frame of thin steel cables, like guitar strings, that carry the vertical striations of the exterior inside. The gallery spaces are ample, though not as nicely proportioned as the ones Cloepfil provided for his recent addition to the Seattle Art Museum. He's working with a famously peculiar space here, but his irregular channel windows (and glass floor strips) answer to the the irregular interiors in ways that tie it all together.

And the Stone building? The case could be made that it's the ghost inside the machine of Cloepfil's.