Drawing, Elevation Perspective, Museum of American Folk Art, New York City

The husband and wife team of Tod Williams and Billie Tsien ranks among the most successful American architectural firms working today. Over the course of their practice, this firm has produced renowned structures for numerous institutions and private clients. Their institutional projects include buildings for Princeton University, Clark University, University of Virginia, the Phoenix Art Museum, and the Cranbrook Educational Community. In addition, they design one or two residences per year, among the most well-known of which are the Speyer townhouse in Manhattan and the Rivkind house in East Hampton, New York, which was the recipient of an AIA award.
The Tod Williams Billie Tsien and Associates project for the American Folk Art Museum in New York City was featured in the 2000 National Design Museum Triennial. Located on a slender plot on West 53rd Street, adjacent to property owned by MoMA, the eight-level building totals 30,000 square feet. The American Folk Art Museum site is exceedingly narrow—only 40 feet—so the architects were compelled to devise a façade that was powerful and monumental enough to make an independent statement.
This elevation perspective, featured as a photo blow-up in the Triennial exhibition, is a rough concept sketch that explores the building’s façade and sculptural form as seen from the MoMA entrance. The large, smooth planes of the façade are roughly shaped like a cupped hand, which permits the building more mass on the street than if the façade were flat. Tod Williams Billie Tsien use drawings sparingly in their design process. Yet this drawing—even when isolated from the range of models that also characterize their design process—shows, in microcosm, a key stage of the building’s design development.
This drawing is one of five related drawings by Tod Williams Billie Tsien proposed for acquisition. These drawings would supplement Cooper-Hewitt’s collection of designs for museum projects by Richard Meier (Getty, Barcelona Contemporary Art Museum, Columbus Athenaeum). The drawings also create a neat closure to the story of New York 20th-century architecture that was initiated by the iconic Maximum Mass studies of Hugh Ferriss, also held by the museum.
January 31, 2001

Drawing, Elevation Perspective, Museum of American Folk Art, New York City; Architect: Tod Williams Billie Tsien and Associates; Drafted by Tod Williams (b. 1943); USA; pen and black ink on tracing paper; (irregular): 45.7 x 34.9 cm (18 in. x 13 3/4 in.); Gift of Tod Williams Billie Tsien; 2001-18-1