Hello, Columbus.(Gallery of Modern Art)

Huntington Hartford's old Gallery of Modern Art--the white marble bonbon that stood at 2 Columbus Circle from 1964 until a couple of years ago--was a hard building to love but became an even harder one to hate. Excoriated by critics when it went up, then championed by preservationists when it was threatened with destruction, the building provides an object lesson in the inexorable march of architectural fashion and may point to an even more basic truth about people and buildings: we get used to things we don't like and then come to like things we've got used to. The eventual decision to refurbish the building entirely has also provided a young Oregon architect named Brad Cloepfil with a dauntingly controversial commission.

The Gallery of Modern Art, one of several quixotic cultural projects launched by Hartford, an heir to the A. & P. fortune, who died earlier this year at the age of ninety-seven, was originally intended to house his collection of figurative works and to stand as a riposte to what Hartford saw as the reign of abstraction at the Museum of Modern Art. The architect was Edward Durell Stone. Stone had been a leading American exponent of the International Style, but, in the fifties, his new wife, a fashion writer he met on an airplane, encouraged him toward elegance and decoration, and he began to fill his buildings with glitter and marble and screens and gold columns.

As a museum, the Columbus Circle building was a disaster. The galleries, tricked out with expensive wood panelling and brass fixtures, were cramped, and the institution closed after five financially ruinous years. And yet somehow the structure's dainty columns, tiny portholes, huge arches, and vast windowless expanses of flat, unadorned white marble embedded themselves more deeply into the consciousness of New Yorkers than many better buildings. So what if it looked like a Bauhaus version of the Alhambra--or, as Ada Louise Huxtable, then the architecture critic at the Times, put it, "a die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollypops"? Amid the austere glass boxes of the nineteen-fifties and sixties, it seemed to strike a blow for quirky individualism. Huxtable's harsh judgment gave rise to a nickname--the Lollipop Building--that was as much affectionate as mocking.

The building eventually wound up in the hands of the city, which, in 1998, decided to sell it to the highest bidder. The city repeatedly refused to have its own Landmarks Preservation Commission consider giving 2 Columbus Circle landmark status, a move that provoked outrage but kept the building salable and more or less sealed its fate. Whether or not the building deserved landmark status depends on what you think a landmark should be: it wasn't great architecture, but it had unique qualities and some historical importance. In 2002, the city agreed to sell it to the Museum of Arts and Design, formerly the American Crafts Museum. The museum was eager for an architect who had never built in New York before, and hired Cloepfil, whose firm, Allied Works Architecture, in Portland, was just completing its first major project, the sharp and serene Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis. Cloepfil started work on his design while the legal struggle to preserve the building was in progress, but in 2005 the preservationists lost in court, and construction began. The building will open next month.

Cloepfil ended up all but demolishing the original building and creating a new one of exactly the same shape and size, and almost the same color. He kept the gentle curve reflecting the shape of Columbus Circle but changed just about everything else. To let light into the interior, he made long linear incisions, two feet wide, in the facade. These glass channels--Cloepfil has called them "ribbons of light"--make a number of right-angle turns across the facade. In place of Stone's marble are twenty-two thousand terra-cotta tiles specially made with a slightly iridescent glaze. Depending on the light, they look white or ...