It's Just a Facade: The American Folk Art Museum and The Interpersonal Relationships of Architects

American Folk Art Museum Exterior. Photo Credit: Dan Nguyen

I recently spoke with playwright Oren Safdie about the American Folk Art Museum, the interpersonal relationships of architects and the emphasis placed on facadism in contemporary heritage practices. Completed by architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien in 2001, the American Folk Art Museum has been called a sensual building. Carefully crafted to respond to the site and programmatic constraints, it’s characterized by a monumental origami facade composed of handcrafted copper-bronze alloy panels. Suffering from financial difficulty, the museum sold the building to the Museum of Modern Art in 2011. In 2014, MoMA announced it would be demolishing the museum as part of a larger expansion led by another architecture duo, Diller Scofidio + Renfro (Goldberger, 2014). 

Architecture and Playwriting

“…the other thing that I think prepared me was that dreaded jury of architecture school where you do have to justify every mean that you make, and I think in my playwriting I feel in my head that I'm always having to justify any choice I make” - Oren Safdie

Oren's background in architecture and playwriting offers a unique perspective on the subject. Prior to playwriting, Oren studied architecture at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture and Planning where he was captivated by the drama that often occurred during architectural juries. Juries seem to be a reoccurring fascination of his. Although Oren’s education in architecture influences the subject matter of his playwriting, he sees the two disciplines as opposites in terms of their creative process. He explains that when starting with a building, a concept is built up into a structure while in playwriting, a question is stripped down to find the truth within. He has since produced a series of tomes on architecture culture. 

Most recently, Oren has written Facade, a comedy focused on the American Folk Art Museum. Similarly to his first experience in playwriting, in the case of Facade, Oren was much more interested in the dynamics of the characters interacting than with the project at hand. Presented as a staged reading at Urban Stages in April, the comedy is described as a fictionalized take on what may have transpired between Williams and Tsien and Diller Scofidio + Renfro “as they grappled with their choices, wrestled with their conscience, and tried to come to a balanced decision in the face of intense scrutiny by their profession, the New York Press, and the public at large (Rabinowitz, 2023). 

Facads and Facadism

"I've seen some beautiful facades in New York City of old buildings…on the street they look wonderful." - Oren Safdie

With increased adaptive reuse projects, there seemed to be a renewed interest in facadism, the practice of preserving a structure's facade while constructing a new building behind it (Robert, 2005). For Oren, who as a student worked on a project retaining the facades of a large block in Montreal, facadism is a successful strategy because it keeps the character of the old city while creating a sense of excitement in the modern interiors. Oren explains that in New York facades play an important role because the buildings are all wedged in together. This was clearly the case of the American Folk Art Museum which featured a single facade with frontage onto West 53rd Street. In fact, much of the rhetoric around the museum is focused on its facade. In writing this comedy, Oren was much more interested in the idiomatic facade as a double entendre because it also questions the idea of friendship and it therefore plays a titular role. But it’s also central to describing the museum. MoMA even cited its opaqueness as one of the reasons for choosing to demolish it stating that it’s “not in keeping with the glass aesthetic of the rest of the museum” (Pogrebin, 2013). It was reported that MoMA would preserve the facade through its copper-bronze alloy panels that are currently stored in a warehouse (Dunlap, 2014).

What transpired in the American Folk Art Museum's story highlights the complex relationships between architects and their buildings. Oren's work explores the tensions that can arise between architects and the importance of preserving the facades of historic buildings. In writing Facade, Oren didn’t intend to contribute to the museum’s narrative as much as to show the different sides and arguments in the architectural decision-making process all while bringing architecture and its inner workings to a general public. 

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This article is based on an episode of “Talking Architecture”, a podcast on architecture. buildings and the stories they tell. You can listen to the full episode in the player below.

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Dunlap, D. W. (2014, February 12). Folk art building may be lost, but facade will live: In storage someplace. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/13/nyregion/folk-art-building-will-be-demolished-but-its-facade-will-live-on.html?_r=0

The ethics of facadism. The Ethics of Facadism: Pragmatism versus Idealism. (n.d.). https://www.buildingconservation.com/articles/facadism/facadism.htm

Goldberger, P. (2014, January 8). Friendly fire on the culture front? why the Museum of Modern Art is making a fatal mistake. Vanity Fair. https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/architecture/2014/01/american-folk-art-museum-demolition

Pogrebin, R. (2013, April 10). 12-year-old building at moma is doomed. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/11/arts/design/moma-to-raze-ex-american-folk-art-museum-building.html

Rabinowitz, C. (2023, March 27). Oren Safdie’s facade to have first public reading at Urban Stages in April. BroadwayWorld.com. https://www.broadwayworld.com/off-broadway/article/Oren-Safdies-FACADE-to-Have-First-Public-Reading-at-Urban-Stages-in-April-20230327