Holly Hotchner is the Director of the Museum of Arts & Design (formerly the American Craft Museum) in New York City, appointed by the Museum’s Board of Governors in 1996. Under her leadership, the Museum is building a new, 58000 square feet (5,388.4 m²) home at 2 Columbus Circle in Manhattan, scheduled to open in September 2008.

Hotchner, with a museum career of more than 30 years, serves on numerous panels for government funding of the arts, and as a juror for exhibitions and for artists’ awards.

During her tenure, Hotchner has increased the Museum’s operating funds and endowment, and intensified exhibition programming and outreach. She has co-organized a number of critically acclaimed exhibitions at the Museum with accompanying catalogues, including Radical Lace & Subversive Knitting; the series on contemporary Native American art, Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation; Ruth Duckworth: Modernist Sculptor; Corporal Identity–Body Language; Beatrice Wood: A Centennial Tribute; 4 Acts in Glass; Art & Industry: 20th Century Porcelain from Sèvres; Defining Craft I: Collecting for the New Millennium; and Venetian Glass: 20th Century Italian Glass from the Olnick Spanu Collection.

Prior to her present position, Hotchner served as Director of the New York Historical Society’s Museum from 1988-1995. Her responsibilities included: restructuring the administration of the museum, overseeing a staff of 40, participating in raising more than $40 million for the institution’s collections, education programs and general operations, and managing a capital improvement program for the museum’s facilities. From 1984-1988 she was the Chief Conservator at the Historical Society, where she led a new program to enhance the care and cataloguing of the museum’s 1.5 million-object collection.

Before joining the New York Historical Society, Hotchner was a Conservation Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and also held positions at The Tate Gallery

Tate

-Places:*Tate, Georgia, a town in the United States*Tate County, Mississippi, a county in the United States*Táté, the Hungarian name for Totoi village, Sântimbru Commune, Alba County, Romania*Tate, Filipino word for States...

 in London, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., the Museum of Modern Art

Museum of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...

, New York and the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...

 in New York.

Hotchner has an M.A. in Art History and a certificate of conservation from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University

New York University

New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...

, and a B.A. in Art History and Studio Art from Trinity College

Trinity College (Connecticut)

Trinity College is a private, liberal arts college in Hartford, Connecticut. Founded in 1823, it is the second-oldest college in the state of Connecticut after Yale University. The college enrolls 2,300 students and has been coeducational since 1969. Trinity offers 38 majors and 26 minors, and has...

.

Hotchner’s entrepreneurial talents came into play when she established Holly Hotchner Fine Arts Management, which provided collections management, cataloguing and conservation services to individuals and corporations, and established the museum division of Audio Arts.

Controversial Redesign of 2 Columbus Circle

Under Hotchner's leadership, the Museum of Arts & Design completed a controversial move to 2 Columbus Circle

2 Columbus Circle

2 Columbus Circle is a small, trapezoidal lot on the south side of Columbus Circle in Manhattan, New York City, USA.The seven-story Pabst Grand Circle Hotel, designed by William H. Cauvet, stood at this address from 1874 until it was demolished in 1960...

. The museum's plans to radically alter the building's original design by Edward Durell Stone

Edward Durell Stone

Edward Durell Stone was a twentieth century American architect who worked primarily in the Modernist style.-Early life:...

 touched off a preservation

Historic preservation

Historic preservation is an endeavor that seeks to preserve, conserve and protect buildings, objects, landscapes or other artifacts of historical significance...

 battle joined by Tom Wolfe

Tom Wolfe

Thomas Kennerly "Tom" Wolfe, Jr. is a best-selling American author and journalist. He is one of the founders of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s.-Early life and education:...

, Chuck Close

Chuck Close

Charles Thomas "Chuck" Close is an American painter and photographer who achieved fame as a photorealist, through his massive-scale portraits...

, Frank Stella

Frank Stella

Frank Stella is an American painter and printmaker, significant within the art movements of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.-Biography:...

, Robert A. M. Stern

Robert A. M. Stern

Robert Arthur Morton Stern, usually credited as Robert A. M. Stern, is an American architect and Dean of the Yale University School of Architecture....

, Columbia art history department chairman Barry Bergdoll

Barry Bergdoll

Barry Bergdoll is a Professor of architectural history in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University and the Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.-Education:...

, New York Times' architecture critics Herbert Muschamp

Herbert Muschamp

Herbert Mitchell Muschamp was an American architecture critic.- Early years :Born in Philadelphia, Muschamp described his childhood home life as follows: “The living room was a secret. A forbidden zone. The new slipcovers were not, in fact, the reason why sitting down there was taboo. That was...

 and Nicolai Ouroussoff

Nicolai Ouroussoff

Nicolai Ouroussoff is the architecture critic for The New York Times.-Biography:Born in Boston, Massachusetts United States, he received a bachelor’s degree in Russian from Georgetown University and a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of ArchitectureThe protégé of the...

, urbanist scholar Witold Rybczynski

Witold Rybczynski

Witold Rybczynski , is a Canadian-American architect, professor and writer.Rybczynski was born in Edinburgh of Polish parentage and raised in Surrey, England before moving at a young age to Canada. He attended Loyola High School , located on Sherbrooke street, in Montreal-Ouest...

, among others. Mayor Michael Bloomberg

Michael Bloomberg

Michael Rubens Bloomberg is the current Mayor of New York City. With a net worth of $19.5 billion in 2011, he is also the 12th-richest person in the United States...

, Ada Louise Huxtable

Ada Louise Huxtable

Ada Louise Huxtable is an architecture critic and writer on architecture. In 1970 she was awarded the first ever Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for "distinguished criticism during 1969."...

, and others, however, supported the redevelopment of a long neglected site. Stone's son Hicks, also an architect, favored preservation and was appalled that "an institution whose central mission is to preserve cultural artifacts is in fact determined to demolish what is probably its most valuable artifact." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64818-2004May28_2.html

Before the building's alterations, Stone's design at 2 Columbus Circle was listed as one of the World Monuments Fund

World Monuments Fund

World Monuments Fund is a private, international, non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of historic architecture and cultural heritage sites around the world through fieldwork, advocacy, grantmaking, education, and training....

's "100 Most Endangered Sites for 2006." In 2004, the National Trust for Historic Preservation

National Trust for Historic Preservation

The National Trust for Historic Preservation is an American member-supported organization that was founded in 1949 by congressional charter to support preservation of historic buildings and neighborhoods through a range of programs and activities, including the publication of Preservation...

 called it one of America's "11 Most Endangered Historic Places."

The museum's new location was developed by Brad Cloepfil

Brad Cloepfil

Brad Cloepfil is an American architect, educator and principal of Allied Works Architecture of Portland, Oregon and New York City. His first major project was an adaptive reuse of a Portland warehouse for the advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy...

 and his Portland, Oregon-based firm Allied Works Architecture. The redesigned building replaced the original white Vermont Marble

Vermont Marble Museum

The Vermont Marble Museum or Vermont Marble Exhibit is a museum commemorating the contributions of Vermont marble and the Vermont Marble Company, located in Proctor, Vermont, USA...

 with a glazed terra-cotta and glass facade. Its nacre

Nacre

Nacre , also known as mother of pearl, is an organic-inorganic composite material produced by some mollusks as an inner shell layer; it is also what makes up pearls. It is very strong, resilient, and iridescent....

ous ceramic

Ceramic

A ceramic is an inorganic, nonmetallic solid prepared by the action of heat and subsequent cooling. Ceramic materials may have a crystalline or partly crystalline structure, or may be amorphous...

 exterior is said to change color at different viewing angles.

Against Cloepfil's wishes, the museum's board and its director, Holly Hotchner, ordered that a band of windows be added to the building's top floor. This added a horizontal strip which connected a pair of vertical bands to create the shape of a letter H. Another vertical band on the western side of the building, reads as an I. Of the addition to the word "HI" to his design, Cloepfil said that "he has never felt more violated in any way."

The architecture critic for the LA Times, Christopher Hawthorne

Christopher Hawthorne

Christopher Hawthorne is an American screenwriter and producer.Hawthorne is best known for writing the screenplay for director Bob Balaban's surrealist horror-comedy Parents, starring Randy Quaid, Mary Beth Hurt, Bryan Madorsky and Sandy Dennis....

, wrote:

It's as if Stone, his architecture muffled and disregarded by Cloepfil, MAD and the city of New York, managed to have the last word on the preservation controversy, popping up from beyond the grave to say hello. The fact that the word in question is unpretentious and loosely informal makes it deliciously Stone-like, and allows it to undermine the severity and cold perfectionism of Cloepfil's exterior all the more.

Eyewitnesses of the redesign have compared the new facade to "suburban aluminum siding" and noted that the facade not only spells "HI," but also other inchoate letters allows a viewer to see the entire German word "HEIL" in the building's gray paneling.

Ada Louise Huxtable

Ada Louise Huxtable

Ada Louise Huxtable is an architecture critic and writer on architecture. In 1970 she was awarded the first ever Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for "distinguished criticism during 1969."...

, who had originally coined the term "Lollipop Building" for the original structure, wrote:

Something has gone noticeably wrong. This is a precisely calibrated aesthetic that can be destroyed by one bad move, and that move has been the late insertion of a picture window on the restaurant floor. The client insisted and the architect resisted, and we will never know when and where the relationship fell apart -- but at some point it obviously did, and so did the design....The eternal banality of the picture window is forever with us...Even with the building's flaws, however, criticism of the structure has been alarmingly out of proportion and flagrantly out of control.

The design has received almost completely negative comments in feedback on the New York Times website. http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/01/in-the-redesign-the-lollipops-have-stuck-around/ http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/a-new-face-on-columbus-circle/ Of the newly uncovered redesign, James Gardner, architecture critic for the NY Sun wrote:

Say what you want about Stone’s building, it was indubitably a landmark; the best that can be said for its replacement is that, if we’re lucky, no one will ever notice it...A thought occurs that might help us out of our newfangled mess: Assuming that what was done to the interior is what needed to be done all along, it might be relatively easy — not now of course, but after a decent interval of, say, five years — to restore the original façade. http://www2.nysun.com/article/74723

Francis Morrone

Francis Morrone

Francis Morrone is an American architectural historian noted for his work on the built history of New York City.Morrone's essays on architecture have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, City Journal, American Arts Quarterly, the New Criterion and the New York Times. He was a columnist for the New...

, also of the NY Sun, wrote:

The new façade...uses glass bands, or "cuts," rather than conventionally patterned fenestration, across a plane of ceramic tiles glazed so as to change color subtly when viewed in different light conditions. For me, I am sorry to say, it's all scaleless. Where Stone's original building read as neatly scaled to its setting, Mr. Cloepfil's redesign reads as a piece of abstract sculpture that, at building scale, seems all wrong.

Paul Goldberger

Paul Goldberger

Paul Goldberger is the Architecture Critic for The New Yorker, where since 1997 he has written the magazine's celebrated "Sky Line" column. He also holds the Joseph Urban Chair in Design and Architecture at The New School in New York City...

 praised the new building's "functional, logical, and pleasant" interior in a review in the New Yorker

The New Yorker

The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...

, but wrote:

Ultimately, Cloepfil has been trapped between paying homage to a legendary building and making something of his own. As a result, if you knew the old building, it is nearly impossible to get it out of your mind when you look at the new one. And, if you’ve never seen Columbus Circle before, you probably won’t be satisfied, either: the building’s proportions and composition seem just as odd and awkward as they ever did.

Architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff

Nicolai Ouroussoff

Nicolai Ouroussoff is the architecture critic for The New York Times.-Biography:Born in Boston, Massachusetts United States, he received a bachelor’s degree in Russian from Georgetown University and a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of ArchitectureThe protégé of the...

 named the building as one of seven buildings in New York City that should be torn down because they "have a traumatic effect on the city." Ouroussoff also wrote:

The renovation remedies the annoying functional defects that had plagued the building for decades. But this is not the bold architectural statement that might have justified the destruction of an important piece of New York history. Poorly detailed and lacking in confidence, the project is a victory only for people who favor the safe and inoffensive and have always been squeamish about the frictions that give this city its vitality.

Witold Rybczynski

Witold Rybczynski

Witold Rybczynski , is a Canadian-American architect, professor and writer.Rybczynski was born in Edinburgh of Polish parentage and raised in Surrey, England before moving at a young age to Canada. He attended Loyola High School , located on Sherbrooke street, in Montreal-Ouest...

 wrote in Slate

Slate (magazine)

Slate is a US-based English language online current affairs and culture magazine created in 1996 by former New Republic editor Michael Kinsley, initially under the ownership of Microsoft as part of MSN. On 21 December 2004 it was purchased by the Washington Post Company...

 that the new design:

feels like an alien presence...Slots appear at random, and a continuous ribbon of fritted glass zigzags down the building, graphic effects that belong more to the packaging of consumer products than to architecture. At the base, several of Stone's original Venetian columns are preserved behind murky glass like body parts in formaldehyde. As for the glazed terra-cotta tiles of the exterior, they are dull and lifeless and make even the slick steel-and-glass facade of the Time-Warner Center next door look lively. The new Museum of Arts and Design is artsy and designy, but it is not good architecture, and it makes me miss Stone's winsome palazzo all the more.

Pulitzer Prize

Pulitzer Prize

The Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by American publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City...

-winning critic, Justin Davidson

Justin Davidson

Justin Davidson is a classical music and architecture critic. He began his journalism career as a local stringer for the Associated Press in Rome before moving to the United States to study music at Harvard...

, said:

This version won’t satisfy those who thought it should never have been touched, and it’s not bold enough to overpower their arguments—or, I suspect, to turn the Museum of Arts and Design into an essential destination.

An article in the New York Times acknowledged that when Holly Hotchner first became the director of the institution ten years ago "few people seemed to have heard of it." Today the museum may be best known for "the bitter preservation battle arose over its purchase and planned renovation of 2 Columbus Circle, the 1964 'lollipop' building near Central Park designed by Edward Durell Stone

Edward Durell Stone

Edward Durell Stone was a twentieth century American architect who worked primarily in the Modernist style.-Early life:...

." Ms. Hotchner said she "hopes it will become known for what it does, not where it is."