The Museum of Arts & Design - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), based in Manhattan

Manhattan

Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...

in New York, New York, is a center for the collection, preservation, study, and display of contemporary hand-made objects in a variety of media, including: clay

Clay

Clay is a general term including many combinations of one or more clay minerals with traces of metal oxides and organic matter. Geologic clay deposits are mostly composed of phyllosilicate minerals containing variable amounts of water trapped in the mineral structure.- Formation :Clay minerals...

, glass

Glass

Glass is an amorphous solid material. Glasses are typically brittle and optically transparent.The most familiar type of glass, used for centuries in windows and drinking vessels, is soda-lime glass, composed of about 75% silica plus Na2O, CaO, and several minor additives...

, metal

Metal

A metal , is an element, compound, or alloy that is a good conductor of both electricity and heat. Metals are usually malleable and shiny, that is they reflect most of incident light...

, fiber

Fiber

Fiber is a class of materials that are continuous filaments or are in discrete elongated pieces, similar to lengths of thread.They are very important in the biology of both plants and animals, for holding tissues together....

, and wood

Wood

Wood is a hard, fibrous tissue found in many trees. It has been used for hundreds of thousands of years for both fuel and as a construction material. It is an organic material, a natural composite of cellulose fibers embedded in a matrix of lignin which resists compression...

. It accommodates 300,000 visitors per year, however, touring exhibitions, outreach efforts, and off-site programs effectively double that audience.

The museum was founded in 1956 by the American Craft Council

American Craft Council

The American Craft Council , was founded in 1943 as a national, nonprofit, educational organization to support and foster interest in the crafts in America. The council sponsers national craft shows, publishes American Craft magazine, and has an extensive awards program...

together with philanthropist

Philanthropist

A philanthropist is someone who engages in philanthropy; that is, someone who donates his or her time, money, and/or reputation to charitable causes...

Aileen Osborn Webb, as the Museum of Contemporary Crafts. In 1986, it relocated to 40 West 53rd Street and was renamed the American Craft Museum. In 2002 it changed its name again to the Museum of Arts and Design. In 2008, the museum moved 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...

2 Columbus Circle

The new location, with more than 54000 square feet (5,016.8 m²), more than tripled the size of the Museum’s former space. It includes: four floors of exhibition galleries for works by established and emerging artists; a 150-seat auditorium in which the museum plans to feature lectures, films, and performances; and a restaurant. It also includes a Center for the Study of Jewelry, and an Education Center that offers multi-media access to primary source material, hands-on classrooms for students, and three artists-in-residence studios.

However, 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.

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

Holly Hotchner

Holly Hotchner is the Director of the Museum of Arts & Design in New York City, appointed by the Museum’s Board of Governors in 1996...

, 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.

An article in the New York Times acknowledged that when Holly Hotchner

Holly Hotchner

Holly Hotchner is the Director of the Museum of Arts & Design in New York City, appointed by the Museum’s Board of Governors in 1996...

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."

External links

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