A couple of hours after my previous post, MoMA announced that it had hired Diller Scofidio & Renfro to design its planned addition to the museum. The museum accepted DS&R’s request to “carefully consider the entirety of the site, including the former American Folk Art Museum building.” DS&R have inoculated director Glen Lowry from continued vituperation and possibly loss of financial support for his ill-advised plan to replace the Folk Art Museum with more large, white-box galleries. … [Read more...]

It’s pretty rare that the cacophonous architectural media lines up about anything, but the wall of resistance to MoMA’s plan to demolish the firm’s design of the American Folk Art Museum is extraordinarily firm and consistent. The promised demolition of the museum is a highly emotional loss for the architecture community, not only because it is a courageous work of art (seeking, whether you like the result  or not, to overcome the tyranny of the vertical museum), but because so little of real … [Read more...]

At the risk of digging myself in even deeper I revisit my last post, which has been oversimplified as “Paul Rudolph’s architecture made the Boston Marathon bomber evil.” I didn’t write, nor do I feel, that architecture has such power.Yet people frequently opine that the environments we create are soulless and alienating, and that is almost taken for granted. Rudolph should not be immune from such scrutiny. The places we make do have meaning, and they do shape us, even if we can’t say … [Read more...]

I spent last Friday impatiently locked down in Cambridge as the search went on for the second suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing. The day before, I’d gone to have a look at the University of Massachusetts campus in Dartmouth, a gigantic eerie, dozen-building concoction of grim ribbed-concrete hubris designed by Paul Rudolph in the 1960s. I had been won over by Rudolph’s government center in Goshen, N.Y., a startlingly intricate composition, also in his characteristic Brutalist style, that … [Read more...]