New York Department of Cultural Affairs

General view; Located on a trapezoidal plot just beyond the southwest corner of Central Park, the quirky, nine-story marble-clad building at Two Columbus Circle was erected in 1964 by George Huntington Hartford II, an heir to the A&P supermarket fortune, as the Huntington Hartford Gallery of Modern Art. Mr. Hartford amassed an impressive modern art collection. His gallery in New York City was built, in part, to house his collection, and to present non-abstract art that was not being displayed by other museums in the city, in particular the Museum of Modern Art. Designed by Edward Durell Stone, who also created the original Museum of Modern Art in 1938, the concave upright rectangle was conceived as a modern design exhibit on its own. Its edges are perforated with double rows of round holes arranged in squares of four, which allowed the art inside to be viewed, at least partially, in diffused natural light. At the top of Stone's building, behind the screen of the loggia, was the two-story Gauguin Room restaurant, which offered panoramic views of Central Park. The building was nicknamed The Lollipop Building" in reference to a mocking review by architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable in which she called it a "die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops." Due to a declining personal fortune and lack of funding, Huntington Hartford was forced to close his gallery after only five years, and in 1969 Mr. Hartford turned the building over to Fairleigh Dickinson University, which used it to house the New York Cultural Center. Gulf+Western Industries purchased the building in 1975 and presented it to the city in 1980, which installed the Department of Cultural Affairs there and the city's visitors' bureau. Both moved out in 1998, leaving the building vacant and crumbling. In 2002 the city sold the building to the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), formerly known as the American Craft Museum. Architect Brad Cloepfil's design will replace the mostly window-less crumbling marble facade with a veil of bleached terra cotta and glass. Architectural preservationists, including Robert A. M. Stern, have campaigned without success to save this example of Stone's work. In 2004, The National Trust named this building one of the most endangered in the nation. [Source: http://www.nycago.org/Organs/NYC/html/HartfordGallery.html] "Cloepfil's highest-profile current project is the redesign of 2 Columbus Circle for the Museum of Arts & Design. The modernist structure designed by Edward Durell Stone was listed as one of the World Monuments Fund's "100 Most Endangered Sites for 2006." In 2004, the National Trust for Historic Preservation called it one of America's "11 Most Endangered Historic Places." Plans to change the building touched off an historic preservation battle. Cloepfil's controversial redesign will open in the fall of 2008. The redesigned building will include a terra-cotta facade, and varied kinds of glass: clear, fritted, and translucent. Its glazed, nacreous ceramic exterior is said to change color at different viewing angles, although eyewitnesses of the redesign have compared the new facade to "suburban aluminum siding." Source: Wikipedia; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page (accessed 2/2/2008