Facing The End?

November 5, 2003

   For many prominent members of the building community here, the answer is no. And, at the risk of sounding like the head of the Stone Cheerleading Squad, I say yes.
   The item in question is, in the New York scale of things, a small building: the former Gallery of Modern Art building at 2 Columbus Circle. Designed by Edward Durell Stone and erected in the early 1960s, it’s a small marble-clad edifice with an odd history and what appears to be a strange future.
   Nobody’s planning to tear down the 10-story building, which will now house the Museum of Arts and Design. Its fate may be painful, however, to anyone who makes their livelihood in stone.
   It’s going to be stripped of its marble and become something of a peekaboo exhibition. And, for those of us who appreciate stone, it’s a shame.
   The story behind 2 Columbus Circle is an upper-class society-and-business soap opera that could easily take up half of this magazine. The short version is that Huntington Hartford, whose money flowed from the A. & P. supermarket empire, managed to acquire control of a piece of land near the southwestern corner of Central Park and put up a structure that some call unique and others deride as a eyesore.
   Describing the building is an art in itself (there are several photos at www.thecityreview.com/hhart.html), but its main outdoor features are solid rows of white marble cladding and, at the bottom, columns with insets of black marble.
   Set in an area of standard Manhattan monoliths, the building looked … well, different. The New York Times’ longtime architecture critic, Ada Louise Huxtable, tagged the columns as “lollipops,” setting the general derisive tone of comment about 2 Columbus Circle.
   The building became an unwanted child; the museum closed before the end of the ‘60s, and various public-sector tenants moved in and out. Currently, it’s vacant, a literal white elephant to New Yorkers and a mystifying oddity to visitors. I stared at the building myself on a cold February afternoon this year, trying to figure out the why and what next.
   A design by architect Brad Cloepfil of the Portland, Ore.-based architectural firm of Allied Works Architecture calls for pulling off the marble and replacing it with glass walls and perforated scrims of terra cotta. For some, it’s the wonderful opening of a building to create a transparent, almost-breathable skin. For others, it’s taking a beautiful stone building and draping it with a funky shower curtain.
   The debate continues on the building. The city’s landmark commission refused to consider historical status. A bevy of architectural critics can’t wait to see the denuding of marble. Tom Wolfe, the noted author who skewered the glass-box designs of modern skyscrapers in From Bauhaus to Our House, defended the building in mid-October on the op-ed pages of the Times. (The City Review piece noted above is also in support of the current building facade.)
   It’s easy to see why the building brings out the dogs in debating its future. The design is a frill among a workaday section of surrounding buildings, much like a slice of cake served in an empty reception hall for a wedding that never happened.
   I don’t share the contempt over glass-box building designs, either. The renovation cross-town of Lever House, one of the first steel-and-glass towers, maintains an important part of architectural history and a fine-looking structure.
   Stripping the marble from 2 Columbus Circle, though, is a bad idea. It’s also more than a battle between the intelligencia of New York when it comes to the use of stone.
   Regardless of its covering, that 10-story building is going to look strange in its sector of Columbus Circle. Any new dressing won’t hide the fact that it’s a baby molar in a set of beauty-queen-sized teeth. The size is adequate for the downtown scale of Canton, Ohio, or Great Falls, Mont.; set in Manhattan, the building’s an eternal orphan.
   The proper use of the ground, in the real-estate economy of Manhattan Island, would be to level the thing and start over with a proper office building/shopping/entertainment complex that pays tribute to The Gap and movie screens too small to affix adequate postage. Unfortunately, the property comes with size and height restrictions, so what you see is really what you can have.
   So, the argument boils down to stone or no stone. Nobody should be surprised that, in this magazine and this space, the vote is for stone.
   Sure, 2 Columbus Circle with its stone facade will remain a curiosity. So is, by its strange midtown Manhattan placement, the limestone-clad Empire State Building. Or the Pentagon, or the U.S. Capitol and 47 of the nation’s statehouses.
    (For the record, at least Alaska uses a fine old stone building, North Dakota built its functional skyscraper during the Great Depression, and Florida’s 22-story edifice was designed, by strange coincidence, by the firm headed by Edward Durell Stone’s son.)
   Those of us who have a passion for stone know that it does something with its installations, from a bathroom vanity top to a venerated monument. It brings a permanence that nothing else matches. There is more than a fine line between dated and timeless, and stone is the material that crosses the threshold.
   This argument, of course, may be a little heavy when dealing with a dinky New York building that usually gets dismissed as architectural folly. But why must there be another building that incorporates more of the corrugated steel and tilt-up concrete kind of appearance?
   If we’re going to make the case for stone in the future, why let something that’s already in place be skinned and hauled away? 2 Columbus Circle may be a lost cause, but maybe we should make sure it’s the exception, and not the trend.

   An afterword: The preservation fight went down to defeat. The building went from this to its current state. And the much-derided lollipops are still there, hidden behind terra-cotta tiles.