MoMA to demolish Folk Art Museum building despite acclaimed design, critics’ rage

The New York arts behemoth will smash down the former museum to make way for its expansion, even though the American Folk Art building has been celebrated as a daring work of contemporary architecture.

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The Museum of Modern Art has told the little museum next door to “folk off.”

The behemoth arts institution in New York has decided to go ahead with the demolition of the former American Folk Art Museum — which sits on a neighboring lot on West 53rd St. — so that it may yet again expand, adding another 100,500 square feet to the sprawling arts complex.

The Folk Art Museum, which opened in 2001 — three years before MoMA’s most recent expansion — was celebrated as a daring work of contemporary architecture by local designers Todd Williams and Billie Tsien. Its bent and beaten copper exterior is itself a sculpture.

That MoMA, with the first and largest architecture and design collections in the world, wants to destroy its notable neighbor has enraged architects, critics and preservationists.

"For an instituion [that] had the first architctecture department ever, they seem to find architecture to [be] the most disposable of the arts," said Simeon Bankoff, director of the Historic Districts Council

MoMA bought the Folk Art Museum in 2011, after the museum defaulted on $32 million in loans that were taken on to erect the new building that’s now being dismantled.

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