Sad but not quite shocking news. Museum of Modern Art officials announced plans yesterday to tear down the American Folk Art Museum, a sliver of a building to its right once awarded the title, "Best Building In The World," in a bid to expand.
The news comes on the heels of a game-changing modern art acquisition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is now poised as a serious competitor to MoMA.
A call to the Folk Art Museum architects, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, by the Huffington Post, was not returned immediately.
MoMA bought the site in 2011 from the struggling but still alive Folk Art Museum, whose many woes read like a "Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark" saga for the art world (money is tight, a former chairman is in jail, the list goes on). While the decision to bulldoze the 12-year-old architectural gem was always on the table, it was one of a few options, according to early reports from the New York Times, which has been closely tracking the drama.
According to the Wall Street Journal, MoMA officials blamed the decree on the smaller museum's opaque facade and its floors, which do not line up with the MoMA's. The eventual plan involves bridging the space where the Folk Art building currently sits to connect the MoMA with galleries in a mixed-use tower yet to be built.
"It's not a comment on the quality of the building or Tod and Billie’s architecture," MoMA director Glenn Lowry told the Times in an interview about the decision. He added that the end for such a small, crafted building when "so many buildings are about bigness" is a "loss for architecture."
"It's tragic," wrote a commenter at the architecture blog Archinect yesterday. We need to start a thread on it and call for a boycott of the new project by all architects. If MOMA moves ahead with this I will never step foot in their museum again."
Earlier this month, sources close to the Folk Art Museum rattled off a list to the Times of fatal errors leading up to the building's sale to MoMA, including misjudging "the cost embedded in the building," a lack of sufficient donors due to the quiet nature of the museum's art, and overconfidence in a survey that indicated being next to the MoMA would raise admissions enough to fund the costs of the building (it didn't).
The doomed 30,000 square foot spiraling structure was built on the strength of a $32 million loan borrowed (and later defaulted on) by the Folk Art Museum.