So, after all that fuss, 2 Columbus Circle seems to have turned out pretty OK.
Cloepfil is a sophisticated architect who, at his best, can endow simple geometries with a powerful dignity. His style couldn’t be more different from that of Edward Durell Stone’s late period, which dances on the edge of kitsch, and he has tried to transform Stone’s fussy marble froufrou into something serious and tasteful. Sometimes, as in the long, turning lines of glass, he manages to assert himself firmly enough to keep the old building at bay. At other times, like at the base of the building, where he has kept all but one of Stone’s lollipop-shaped columns and put them behind glass, he seems to have given up altogether and settled for a curatorial role.
I can’t say I fully understood the lengthy, vehement and extremely high-profile efforts to save the original building for all eternity. It seems as though many people only liked it because they got used to hating it so much:
the building provides an object lesson in the inexorable march of architectural fashion and may point to an even more basic truth about people and buildings: we get used to things we don’t like and then come to like things we’ve got used to.
Regardless, the new building will certainly do something the old one couldn’t muster the architectural integrity to do: actually function as an art museum.
