The most thought-provoking image from last night’s conversation about MoMA’s expansion plan, hosted by the Architectural League of New York in Manhattan, rendered an impossibility: the incorporation of the Todd Williams Bille Tsien-designed American Folk Art Museum into an expanded MoMA campus. Liz Diller, a principal of Diller Scofidio + Renfro who are designing the expansion, displayed the image as part of her presentation explaining why the firm could not find an alternative to demolishing the much-beloved building that met MoMA’s needs. Now owned by the growing Midtown institution, whose director Glenn Lowry also addressed the sold-out crowd, the Folk Art Museum building is set to be razed by June.
In detailing the feasibility study her firm conducted to find alternatives to demolishing the AFAM building, Diller showed the above image to illustrate how the building’s interior might look if it was integrated into MoMA’s adjoining galleries. Because the Folk Art Museum’s floor plates don’t line up with MoMA’s, Diller said, the result would be “very Gordon Matta-Clark“: disjointed half-floors plated in glass would preserve the AFAM’s intimate and narrow galleries, without altering MoMA’s current circulation. The building’s vertical orientation and lighting program also worked against MoMA’s stipulation that the redesign generate an open, multipurpose spatial configuration for its galleries, according to Diller. She emphasized that the current plans for an expanded MoMA “are very notional,” but it’s certain after last night that they won’t include the former Folk Art Museum.
— Anna Kats (@fortunaviriliis)
Image courtesy of the Architectural League of New York.
