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One recent afternoon, Brad Cloepfil, the 51-year-old architect whose Portland- and New York–based firm, Allied Works, has been creating some of the most striking buildings in the United States over the past decade, showed hard-hatted visitors around the raw inside of his latest project: the total rebirth of 2 Columbus Circle, the white Manhattan monolith originally designed by Edward Durrell Stone that Ada Louise Huxtable, then The New York Times's voluble architecture critic, famously described as a "die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollypops." Cloepfil sipped at a martini fetched from a local tavern and, at one point, made a surprisingly nimble leap over a two-foot-wide cut in the concrete floor, one of several treacherous incisions that, as prescribed by his design, pinwheel out from the building's core and up the façade—a daring stroke for bringing natural light and stunning views to what will soon become the new home of New York's Museum of Arts and Design. (When the project is completed, the cuts will, thankfully, be filled in with translucent glass.)
Given all the controversy, dysfunction, and dismay that have stuck to 2 Columbus Circle ever since its opening in 1964 as supermarket heir Huntington Hartford's short-lived Gallery of Modern Art, Cloepfil's fearless display was arguably one of the more joyous events ever to have occurred inside the building. After a high-profile and often histrionic preservation battle, there's now no turning back for the new 2 Columbus Circle, which, until the current reconstruction, resembled a mausoleum as imagined by Dr. Seuss, and had languished in a state of abandonment and decrepitude since 1998.
Not for the first time, Cloepfil has sidestepped and gone way beyond the simplistic equation of, as he puts it, "save it or tear it down." In such groundbreaking projects as the repurposed warehouse headquarters of the advertising firm Wieden + Kennedy in Portland, Oregon (Cloepfil's hometown, where he founded Allied in 1994), and the recent tower addition to the Seattle Art Museum (whose original 1990 structure was designed by Robert Venturi, the man who put the post in postmodernism), Cloepfil has proven singularly agile when it comes to melding past legacies with present needs. Meanwhile, finding as much inspiration in the sculpture of Richard Serra as in the work of Louis Kahn, he has emerged as the go-to guy in American museum design, providing relief for what could be called the post-Bilbao hangover. His museums, which have also cropped up in St. Louis and in Ann Arbor, showcase art in what he calls "charged vessels," rather than burying it inside elaborate branding statements.
Holly Hotchner, the Museum of Arts and Design's director, says that Cloepfil beat out an impressive field (including Zaha Hadid) for the commission thanks to his "amazing, unusual sense of materials" and "completely refreshing approach." His work is often categorized as elegant, refined, sensitive, and even polite: a brainy approach to such essentials as light and volume. But when the new museum opens next September across Eighth Avenue from the Time Warner Center, New York will have gained not only a revived cultural institution and a new landmark for the 21st century but the most exuberant addition to its urban fabric in decades: a daring statement that modernism is an eternally renewable aesthetic resource. Even the shrillest pro-Stone preservationist might recant.
