If you hurry, you might catch one last look at the Folk Art Museum, that moody performance in white bronze and béton brut that made instant architectural celebrities out of Tod Williams and Billie Tsien when it opened thirteen years ago. By June it will be too late, according to the Museum of Modern Art, which is razing the building in the course of its new expansion campaign. Since the announcement came at the start of the year, MOMA has drawn what are surely the most uniformly negative headlines in its history: “A Museum That Has Lost Its Way” (The Wall Street Journal), “The Museum with a Bulldozer’s Heart” (The New York Times), “MOMA Loses Face” (The New York Review of Books), “This Is How You Ruin a Cultural Institution” (New Republic), and—most pithily—“Please Save Modernism from the Modern” (Design Observer).

MOMA came by the Folk Art Museum inadvertently, when that tiny institution nearly went bankrupt in the financial crisis of 2008 and retreated to a much smaller facility on Lincoln Square. In normal circumstances, the acquisition would have been regarded as a major coup, and perhaps spared. But MOMA had its eyes on a larger prize. Just to the west of the Folk Art Museum is the site of the forthcoming Tower Verre, a spectacular seventy-eight-story residential tower by the French architect Jean Nouvel, which will rival