Several months ago, the new exterior of 2 Columbus Circle in New York City was unveiled with relatively little fanfare. Located at the conjunction of the rectilinear Manhattan grid, the oblique line of Broadway, and the traffic circle that marks the southwest corner of Central Park, the building has been the topic of much controversy for the past few years. The facade makeover is part of the radical alteration of the modernist Edward Durell Stone’s beloved 1960s building by the Museum of Arts and Design and its architect, Brad Cloepfil.
Stone’s original design included ornamental roundels, “lollipop” columns (derisively so named by Ada Louise Huxtable), and an arched opening at the top — orientalizing motifs meant to recall Venetian design and probably influenced by the architect’s previous commissions to design U.S. embassies in India and elsewhere.
Most striking, however, were the central expanses of unarticulated gray marble surface that spanned six floors on each facade. This unusual architectural composition was quite specifically tied to the building’s function: it’s only because 2 Columbus Circle was an art gallery — and thus didn’t need windows — that it could be built with load-bearing concrete walls. The surfaces were modulated only by the main facade’s slight curvature (which showed deference to the building’s particular urban site) and the “porthole” perforations at the corners (which ensured that the composition would read as four individual surfaces rather than a single monolith). Furthermore, by conspicuously “veiling” the interior, these walls conveyed the building’s function of containing something precious.
According to John Ruskin, the great 19th-century critic and historian of Venetian architecture, the visual energy of sublime Gothic structures came from their “wide, bold, and unbroken” walls. In Ruskin’s account, the integrity of Gothic architecture began to degrade when architects grew fearful of bare surfaces and started to decorate them with frippery that had little to do with the basic spatial and structural concepts. Ruskin’s theories helped influence the modern movement’s distaste for excessive ornamentation. At 2 Columbus Circle, the facade’s audacious blankness gave the building its strong urban presence and safeguarded it from lapsing into exoticist pastiche.
The new exterior retains vestiges of the impressive central surface, but large vertical strips of glass have been added at the top and zig-zag channels snake down to the bottom. It’s hard to believe that the lower slits of glass significantly alter the interior character; their primary effect is to slice up the formerly unadorned facades as seen from outside. Instead of reading as a hollow box whose taut surfaces self-consciously trace the tension between the urban forces around it and the program of the museum within, the building now reads as a solid object, decoratively inscribed or perhaps inadvertently fractured.