Façade Fight On in N.Y.

NEW YORK – The fight over a unique marble-clad building in the city’s Upper West Side continues with a learned war of words and legal action.
The controversy involves 2 Columbus Circle, a nine-story building located near the southwest corner of Central Park. Designed in 1964 by architect Edward Durell Stone to house the art collection of millionaire Huntington Hartford, the building – windowless, except for its top story – would be stripped of its stone in a new design.
The building only lasted a few years in its first duty as Hartford’s Gallery of Modern Art. Since then, ownership shifted to the New York city government for use in various non-museum capacities; last year, the city announced plans to sell the building to the Museum of Arts & Design.
The controversy began as the prospective new owner revealed a design by architect Brad Cloepfil to strip the original marble façade and replace it with a more-transparent design. The move stirred up a new debate on the building, which has had its supporters and detractors since its erection nearly four decades ago.
Noted author Tom Wolfe, who eschewed much of modernist architecture in his critique From Bauhaus to Our House, submitted an op-ed piece supporting preservation of 2 Columbus Circle to the New York Times last October. Ada Louise Huxtable, who offered a negative look at the building in the mid-1960s as architecture critic for the Times, supported the façade removal in a Wall Street Journal article last month.
Huxtable, now the Journal’s architecture critic, cited several technical reasons for her support of the new façade. She contends that inspections of the building show rusting of the metal shims, resulting in cracking and spalling of the current façade’s marble panels (and requiring replacement of stone); and, an interior vapor barrier would need to be constructed.
“Inspection has found the façade so badly deteriorated that it can’t be save; it would have to be rebuilt – a copy or reproduction would have to replace it,” Huxtable wrote in the Journal.
The arguments may be heard in New York courtrooms, since several preservation groups and other individuals sought an injunction in November to prevent the sale of the building, contending that there’s been no proper review to consider the building as an historic landmark.
The lawsuit drew a sharp response from the Museum of Arts & Design’s director, who called it, “an abuse of the legal system by a few people who are seeking to impose their views” in a Los Angeles Times article. At a press conference, Wolfe provided his own barbed reply.
“It is not a small-but-vocal minority who want to save 2 Columbus Circle,” he said. “There is small-but-vocal bridge club (that) wants to get rid of it.”