MAD's Striptease: Cloepfil Shows New York What He's Got

The Dance of the MAD Veils, as observed last July

By Martin Filler, Guest Blogger

I smiled when I read the juicy NY Times obituary of Sherry Britton, the burlesque queen of prewar renown, who died on April 1 at age 89. After her stripping days were done, she became a summer stock trouper during the 1950s, when I saw her perform at New Jersey's Camden County Music Circus in some musical or other--perhaps "Guys and Dolls," in which she toured nationally as the golden-hearted floozy Miss Adelaide--though all I really remember is Miss Britton's, um, commanding stage presence.

She was famed for her provocatively slow striptease, the architectural equivalent of which has been happening lately on New York's Columbus Circle, where Edward Durell Stone's Gallery of Modern Art of 1962-1964 (familiarly but incorrectly known as the Huntington Hartford Museum) is being transformed by Brad Cloepfil of Portland's Allied Works Architecture into the new home of the Museum of Arts & Design (formerly known as the American Craft Museum.)

Bit by tantalizing bit, the gauzy black protective tarps that have shrouded the ten-story structure during its lengthy remodeling are dropping away, revealing what all the fuss was about. While architectural crimes of all sorts were being perpetrated all over the city, an inordinate amount of sound and fury surrounded the burning issue of whether or not Stone's silly little building ought to be preserved for future generations. (My opinion was just to let it crumble away into a romantic urban ruin.) As architect, scholar and critic Michael Sorkin correctly noted at the time, why was no one getting that worked up over the simultaneous emergence of the horrific behemoth that now looms over the comparatively tiny museum-- the Time Warner Building of 2000-2004 by David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill?

I'll have to wait until I see the inside of Cloepfil's remodeling to weigh in with my opinion, even though his skin treatment-- which replaces Stone's lacy white marble veneer with stone, glass, and steel cladding worked into a meandering rectilinear pattern--has turned out much as I expected, confirming my longstanding belief that surface reworkings of existing structures are a waste of time and money.

Although Cloepfil has expanded the original volume of the building to the north as much as the minuscule site would allow, retaining the steel skeleton--a necessary economic decision--makes it unlikely that the new museum's interiors will be any better than those of the first incarnation, which means not very good at all.

A small footprint is no insurmountable obstacle, as brilliantly demonstrated by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa's New Museum of Contemporary Art, which works wonders with a handkerchief-sized plot. But as any architect will tell you, it's much easier to build from scratch than to remodel.

The Museum of Arts & Design's new home, atop one of New York's busiest subway nodes, has location, location, location. But it remains to be seen if this controversy-ridden fixer-upper was a stroke of recycling genius or merely a case of throwing good money after bad.