Schwarz
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on fucking up 2CC
The wraps are starting to come off 2 Columbus Circle, which will be reborn this fall as the Museum of Art and Design. Although it remains within the dimensions and footprint of the original, the structure, formerly home to the Huntington Hartford Museum, has been fundamentally changed inside and out — and the city is much the poorer for that.
Since its inauguration in 1964, this beleaguered building has been one of the most enduringly divisive structures in the city, if not the world. No sooner had it opened than the architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable dubbed it the "Venetian lollipop" building, because of the peculiar arcade at its base. And in the nearly half-century since, that label has stuck, like obscene graffiti smeared across its entrance — to be distinguished, naturally, from the actual graffiti smeared across its entrance. For the longest time, simply to mention "the lollipop building" passed for taste and discernment in matters of architecture and design.
Why did "everyone" hate this building, the loving labor of Edward Durrell Stone, one of America's most eminent Modernist architects? Back in 1964, its tentative embrace of historicism, contextualism, and even irony — qualities later embraced by the Postmodernists — seemed heretical and appalling. It felt like decades since anyone had had the gall and poor judgment to attempt something other than a glass and steel curtain wall.
Often overlooked, however, is that even back then there were people [me] who quite liked the building. Even if its embrace of Venetian and Byzantine motifs was halfhearted at best, still there was a positive enchantment to the place, a sense — and here I draw upon memories from my own childhood — that architecture could open up whole new worlds to the receptive soul. Unlike most buildings in Manhattan, 2 Columbus Circle presented a smooth, windowless expanse of gleaming white marble, qualified by adorable round portholes along the sides and ruddy granite accents. Imagine a Modernist re-enactment of a Venetian palazzo dropped into one of the busiest intersections in the busiest city in the world and encircled, like an island, by the ceaseless flow of traffic rather than the green waters of the Grand Canal!