Holly Hotchner

Holly Hotchner is the Director of the Museum of Arts & Design (formerly the American Craft Museum) in New York City, appointed by the Museum’s Board of Governors in 1996. Under her leadership, the Museum is building a new, 58,000 square foot home at 2 Columbus Circle in Manhattan, scheduled to open in September 2008.

Hotchner, with a museum career of more than 30 years, serves on numerous panels for government funding of the arts, and as a juror for exhibitions and for artists’ awards.

During her tenure, Hotchner has increased the Museum’s operating funds and endowment, and intensified exhibition programming and outreach. She has co-organized a number of critically acclaimed exhibitions at the Museum with accompanying catalogues, including Radical Lace & Subversive Knitting; the series on contemporary Native American art, Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation; Ruth Duckworth: Modernist Sculptor; Corporal Identity–Body Language; Beatrice Wood: A Centennial Tribute; 4 Acts in Glass; Art & Industry: 20th Century Porcelain from Sevres; Defining Craft I: Collecting for the New Millennium; and Venetian Glass: 20th Century Italian Glass from the Olnick Spanu Collection.

Prior to her present position, Hotchner served as Director of the New York Historical Society’s Museum from 1988-1995. Her responsibilities included: restructuring the administration of the museum, overseeing a staff of 40, participating in raising more than $40 million for the institution’s collections, education programs and general operations, and managing a capital improvement program for the museum’s facilities. From 1984-1988 she was the Chief Conservator at the Historical Society, where she led a new program to enhance the care and cataloguing of the museum’s 1.5 million-object collection.

Before joining the New York Historical Society, Hotchner was a Conservation Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and also held positions at The Tate Gallery in London, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Hotchner has an M.A. in Art History and a certificate of conservation from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, and a B.A. in Art History and Studio Art from Trinity College.

Hotchner’s entrepreneurial talents came into play when she established Holly Hotchner Fine Arts Management, which provided collections management, cataloguing and conservation services to individuals and corporations, and established the museum division of Audio Arts.

Controversial Redesign of 2 Columbus Circle

Under Hotchner's leadership, the Museum of Arts & Design completed a controversial move to 2 Columbus Circle. The museum's plans to radically alter the building's original design by Edward Durell Stone touched off a preservation battle joined by Tom Wolfe, Chuck Close, Frank Stella, Robert A. M. Stern, Columbia art history department chairman Barry Bergdoll, New York Times' architecture critics Herbert Muschamp and Nicolai Ouroussoff, urbanist scholar Witold Rybczynski, among others. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Ada Louise Huxtable, and others, however, supported the redevelopment of a long neglected site. Stone's son Hicks, also an architect, favored preservation and was appalled that "an institution whose central mission is to preserve cultural artifacts is in fact determined to demolish what is probably its most valuable artifact." [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64818-2004May28_2.html]

Before the building's alterations, Stone's design at 2 Columbus Circle was listed as one of the World Monuments Fund's "100 Most Endangered Sites for 2006." [citation | title=World Monuments Watch: 2 Columbus Circle | publisher=World Monuments Fund ] [citation | last=Anderson | first=Lisa | title='Cradle of civilization' endangered, fund says. | publisher=Chicago Tribune | year=2005 | date=2005-06-22 | url=http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-32327717_ITM ] In 2004, the National Trust for Historic Preservation called it one of America's "11 Most Endangered Historic Places."

The museum's new location was developed by Brad Cloepfil and his Portland, Oregon-based firm Allied Works Architecture. The redesigned building replaced the original white Vermont Marble with a glazed terra-cotta and glass facade. Its nacreous ceramic exterior is said to change color at different viewing angles.

Against Cloepfil's wishes, the museum's board and its director, Holly Hotchner, ordered that a band of windows be added to the building's top floor. This added a horizontal strip which connected a pair of vertical bands to create the shape of a letter H. Another vertical band on the western side of the building, reads as an I. Of the addition to the word "HI" to his design, Cloepfil said that "he has never felt more violated in any way." [citation | title=Violations, grids, sugar cubes | publisher=Columbia Graduate School of Architecture (Greg) | url=http://www.archinect.com/schoolblog/entry.php?id=80223_0_39_0_C ]

The architecture critic for the LA Times, Christopher Hawthorne, wrote::It's as if Stone, his architecture muffled and disregarded by Cloepfil, MAD and the city of New York, managed to have the last word on the preservation controversy, popping up from beyond the grave to say hello. The fact that the word in question is unpretentious and loosely informal makes it deliciously Stone-like, and allows it to undermine the severity and cold perfectionism of Cloepfil's exterior all the more. [citation | title=N.Y. facade spells trouble | publisher=LA Times | url=http://http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/arts/la-et-columbus25-2008sep25,0,5446580.story ]

Eyewitnesses of the redesign have compared the new facade to "suburban aluminum siding" and noted that the facade not only spells "HI," but also other inchoate letters allows a viewer to see the entire German word "HEIL" in the building's gray paneling. [citation | title=2 Columbus Circle Redesign | publisher=Wired New York | url=http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3583&page=39 ] [citation | title=2 Columbus Circle Redesign | publisher=Wired New York | url=http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3583&page=42 ] [citation | title=In the Redesign, the Lollipops Have Stuck Around | publisher=New York Times | url=http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/01/in-the-redesign-the-lollipops-have-stuck-around/#comments ]

The design has received almost completely negative comments in feedback on the New York Times website. [http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/01/in-the-redesign-the-lollipops-have-stuck-around/] [http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/a-new-face-on-columbus-circle/] Of the newly uncovered redesign, James Gardner, architecture critic for the NY Sun wrote::Say what you want about Stone’s building, it was indubitably a landmark; the best that can be said for its replacement is that, if we’re lucky, no one will ever notice it...A thought occurs that might help us out of our newfangled mess: Assuming that what was done to the interior is what needed to be done all along, it might be relatively easy — not now of course, but after a decent interval of, say, five years — to restore the original façade. [http://www2.nysun.com/article/74723]

Francis Morrone, also of the NY Sun, wrote: :The new façade...uses glass bands, or "cuts," rather than conventionally patterned fenestration, across a plane of ceramic tiles glazed so as to change color subtly when viewed in different light conditions. For me, I am sorry to say, it's all scaleless. Where Stone's original building read as neatly scaled to its setting, Mr. Cloepfil's redesign reads as a piece of abstract sculpture that, at building scale, seems all wrong. [cite web |url=http://www.nysun.com/calendar/taking-a-fresh-look-at-columbus-circle/83318/ |title=Taking a Fresh Look at Columbus Circle|accessmonthday=August 7 |accessyear=2008 |last= Morrone |first=Francis |date=2008-08-07 |publisher="The New York Sun"]

Paul Goldberger praised the new building's "functional, logical, and pleasant" interior in a review in the New Yorker, but wrote::Ultimately, Cloepfil has been trapped between paying homage to a legendary building and making something of his own. As a result, if you knew the old building, it is nearly impossible to get it out of your mind when you look at the new one. And, if you’ve never seen Columbus Circle before, you probably won’t be satisfied, either: the building’s proportions and composition seem just as odd and awkward as they ever did. [cite web |url=http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/skyline/2008/08/25/080825crsk_skyline_goldberger/ |title=Hello, Columbus|accessmonthday=August 19 |accessyear=2008 |last= Goldberger |first=Paul |date=2008-08-25 |publisher="The New Yorker"]

Architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff named the building as one of seven buildings in New York City that should be torn down because they "have a traumatic effect on the city." [cite web |url=http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/arts/design/28ouro.html?ei=5070&emc=eta1&pagewanted=all/ |title=New York City, Tear Down These Walls |accessmonthday=September 28 |accessyear=2008 |last= Ouroussoff |first=Nicolai |date=2008-09-26 |publisher="The New York Times"] Ouroussoff also wrote::The renovation remedies the annoying functional defects that had plagued the building for decades. But this is not the bold architectural statement that might have justified the destruction of an important piece of New York history. Poorly detailed and lacking in confidence, the project is a victory only for people who favor the safe and inoffensive and have always been squeamish about the frictions that give this city its vitality. [cite web |url=http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/26/arts/design/26desi.html?_r=1&ref=arts&oref=slogin |title=New Face, Renewed Mission |accessmonthday=September 26 |accessyear=2008 |last= Ouroussoff|first=Nicolai |date=2008-26-07 |publisher="New York Times"]

Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, Justin Davidson, said::This version won’t satisfy those who thought it should never have been touched, and it’s not bold enough to overpower their arguments—or, I suspect, to turn the Museum of Arts and Design into an essential destination. [cite web |url=http://nymag.com/arts/architecture/reviews/49939/ |title=Museum Date|accessmonthday=September 08 |accessyear=2008 |last= Davidson|first=Justin |date=2008-09-07 |publisher="New York Magazine"]

An article in the New York Times acknowledged that when Holly Hotchner first became the director of the institution ten years ago "few people seemed to have heard of it." Today the museum may be best know for "the bitter preservation battle arose over its purchase and planned renovation of 2 Columbus Circle, the 1964 'lollipop' building near Central Park designed by Edward Durell Stone." Ms. Hotchner said she "hopes it will become known for what it does, not where it is."citation | last=Pogrebin | first=Robin | title=The Museum of Arts and Design Prepares for Its New Home | publisher=The New York Times | year=2006 | date=2006-03-22 | url=http://travel2.nytimes.com/2006/03/22/arts/design/22desi.html ]

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