Acquiring a Taste For Marble Lollipops; 2 Columbus Circle, Much Despised, Is Now Somewhat Admired

Like a great chunk of white chocolate on Columbus Circle, the Gallery of Modern Art was too rich for sophisticated tastes when it opened in 1964. But as the Giuliani administration ponders its fate, more than a few New Yorkers are admitting that it has become a guilty pleasure they would hate to give up.

After all, lounge music and leopard-skin prints are back, so it figures that there is renewed appreciation of a trapezium-shaped marble structure poised on curvy Y-shaped columns, bordered by filigree-like portholes and topped by an arcaded restaurant in which Polynesian luau lunches were once served.

The city-owned building at 2 Columbus Circle has been empty since April, when its last tenant, the Department of Cultural Affairs, moved out.

Bidders for the site include Donald J. Trump, who would construct a 12-story hotel there, and the Dahesh Museum, which would restore the existing building. The Alexander and Louisa Calder Foundation would reuse the galleries and reclad the facade. But City Hall may simply replace the nine-story structure with a park or open space.

The Economic Development Corporation is mum, and the question of 2 Columbus Circle has yet to be presented for formal consideration by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, no great admirer of the building.

Deputy Mayor Randy L. Levine said that a decision may come soon as part of the overall reinvigoration of Columbus Circle, including the development of the New York Coliseum site and the rerouting of traffic in rotary fashion.

Admirers of the building believe that it could be an ornament to the circle.

They think its cascading galleries are surprisingly sophisticated. They respect the way its concave facade observes the geometry of Columbus Circle. They enjoy it as a memento of an exuberant era and an eccentric builder, Huntington Hartford, heir to the A & P supermarket fortune. Some even think the building is -- gasp -- a landmark.

There would have been no predicting this in 1964 when the gallery was most memorably dismissed as a ''die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops'' by Ada Louise Huxtable, the architecture critic at The New York Times. Today, she allows that she gets ''a little lift, a sense of pleasure'' walking by the building.

''I'll never elevate it to a work of art, but I think it has many things in its favor,'' said Ms. Huxtable, now the architecture critic at The Wall Street Journal. ''It's the only identifiable object on Columbus Circle. And the interior was so predictive of what was going to happen in architecture. I think it should be reused.''

So does Robert A. M. Stern, dean of the Yale School of Architecture, who favors landmark designation of the building. Mr. Stern said the design, by the architect Edward Durell Stone, is ''important, thoughtful and carefully articulated.''

An architect who knows Columbus Circle well, David M. Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, said Stone's building ''represents a moment in this century extremely well.'' The Skidmore firm has designed two projects for the Coliseum site, including a complex for both Time Warner headquarters and the Jazz at Lincoln Center concert hall.

''If someone could figure out a use for it, it would really be a good thing to save,'' Mr. Childs said of 2 Columbus Circle. ''It has a nice presence and wholeness to it. While it's easy to hate these things, I remember in school that no one could abide Art Deco. Now it's many people's favorite period.''

Mr. Trump is unpersuaded.

Even though he owns the General Motors Building on Fifth Avenue -- another marble-clad, Stone-designed 1960's structure overlooking Central Park -- Mr. Trump is contemptuous of 2 Columbus Circle.

''This has got to be the worst building in the city of New York,'' he said. ''It was universally disliked until people learned that it's about ready to come down. Then you have do-gooders coming to the rescue.''

Mr. Trump said, ''It's sad to have a building in that good a location with a wall without windows.''

The Calder Foundation is not much more enamored of the exterior. ''We don't like Ed Stone's portholes,'' said Alexander S. C. Rower, director of the foundation and grandson of the artist Alexander Calder. The foundation owns the largest collection of Calder's works.

It envisions an architectural competition for a new facade, but would happily reuse the museum space, which cascades from the fifth to the second floors.

The Dahesh Museum, which specializes in European academic painting of the 19th and early 20th centuries, appreciates the whole structure. ''It is the right size for us, said the director, J. David Farmer. ''And we'd love nothing more than to preserve it.''

The museum now operates at 601 Fifth Avenue, near 48th Street.

''The Dahesh Museum would in effect serve as the entry to a cultural corridor'' connecting Lincoln Center to the Museum of Modern Art, said Hugh Hardy, of Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates, an architectural adviser to the Dahesh Museum.

The Dahesh proposal has been welcomed by the art historian Robert Rosenblum; the sculptor Richard Lippold; C. Hugh Hildesley, executive vice president of Sotheby's; State Senator-elect Thomas K. Duane of Manhattan, and the Committee for Environmentally Sound Development, a neighborhood group.

It has also been endorsed by Juliet Hartford, an artist and Wilhelmina model who is Mr. Hartford's youngest daughter. ''Everybody in the art and fashion world loves that building,'' she said.

Ms. Hartford has enlisted support from Brooke Astor, Prince Rainier of Monaco and Erivan Haub, who is the majority shareholder of the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company.

Conspicuously absent from the list is Mr. Hartford himself, now 87 years old and living in Brooklyn. His daughter said he was not well enough to discuss the matter but would certainly be ''shocked'' if the building were demolished.

There is little else to mark Mr. Hartford's celebrated squandering of the $100 million fortune he inherited. His ill-starred projects in the 1950's and 60's included a cafe for Central Park, an artists' colony, a resort in the Bahamas, an automated parking garage, a handwriting institute, a modeling agency and Show Magazine.

He despised what he called ''thoroughly degenerate'' abstract art. Unlike most art critics, however, Mr. Hartford could put $7.5 million where his mouth was.

''My museum represents the taste of the country more than any of them,'' he said at the time. The centerpiece was a painting commissioned from Salvador Dali, ''The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus'' -- perfect for Columbus Circle. (It now hangs in the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla.)

Stone, a co-designer of the Museum of Modern Art in 1939, called Mr. Hartford a ''modern-day Medici'' and favored his patron with white Vermont marble walls, book-matched walnut paneling, parquet and terrazzo floors, bronze fixtures, crimson carpeting and 12-inch-wide hinged portholes arranged in blocks of four along each corner. Their circular pattern was repeated endlessly in balustrades, paving, doors and ceilings. Most of the fixtures and finishes are intact.

''Compared with the current hygienic austerity of much of our architecture, this building may be considered romantic -- a radical departure, with its arches and use of rich materials,'' Stone wrote in 1962.

Critics found words other than ''romantic'' to describe the building, as Tom Wolfe recounted in his 1981 book ''From Bauhaus to Our House'':

''Not even such terms as 'kitsch for the rich' and 'marble lollipops' convey the poisonous mental atmosphere in which Stone now found himself. He was reduced, at length, to saying such things as, 'Every taxi driver in New York will tell you it's his favorite building.' ''

The financially troubled gallery was taken over in 1969 by Fairleigh Dickinson University and operated for six more years as the New York Cultural Center. Gulf and Western Industries bought the structure and donated it to New York City as the headquarters for the Department of Cultural Affairs.

Henry Geldzahler, who was Cultural Affairs Commissioner, and his companion, Christopher Scott, directed a renovation that preserved the open spaces and sumptuous materials. ''They embraced it as good design,'' recalled Paul Gunther, who was a special assistant to the Commissioner.

On accepting the building in 1980 (a plaque marking the event still hangs in the lobby), Mayor Edward I. Koch said it was a ''nice home'' for the cultural agency. But he feels no lingering sentiment. ''It was never a cuddly building,'' Mr. Koch said this month. ''It's an ugly building and totally unusable.''

Two Columbus Circle is not an official landmark, and even an advocacy group like the New York Landmarks Conservancy is not sure it should be. The board is too divided on the merits of the building to take a position.

But that intramural conflict is almost a recommendation itself, said the conservancy president, Peg Breen. ''Thank God there are still buildings that generate controversy and fuel the debate about architecture in this town,'' she said.

''The longer I've seen it, the more I like it,'' Ms. Breen said. ''It's quirky and different. And I'm sure it's better than anything else that's going to be put there.''