10.12.2003
From bauhaus to glasshouse
[Posted 12:27 PM by James Panero]
In today’s Times, guest columnist Tom Wolfe treats New Yorkers to a defense of 2 Columbus Circle, the much-maligned white marble building at the south-west corner of Central Park–formerly the Huntington Hartford museum–from the glass-box retrofitting of architect Brad Cloepfil. Of course, to some, Cloepfil’s plans eerily echo the rage for progress that destroyed McKim, Mead, and White’s Pennsylvania Station some forty years ago.
Now we can understand the deeply faith-based orthodoxy of Architect Cloepfil’s plans for dematerializing Stone’s white marble museum. The marble will be removed and carted off somewhere, very likely New Jersey, to be fed as landfill to the mucky maw of the Jersey marshes, at a cost of millions. The marble walls will be replaced by, one scarcely need add, glass walls. In place in front of the glass walls, explained Holly Hotchner, director of the Museum Formerly Known as Craft, at a press conference on April 2, with a beaming Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg standing by, will be curtain walls, top to bottom and all around. The curtains walls, known as “scrims,” “veils” or “layers” in theoryspeak, will be made of panels of perforated glazed terra cotta, probably 18-or-so inches from the glass walls. The perforations in the terra cotta will offer peekaboo voyeurism. At intervals will be wide glass “columns,” so-called, but rectangular, flush with the plane of the curtain walls. They will offer the voyeurs outside the full Monty, a direct look at what’s going on inside.