In New Name, Museum Goes Contemporary

With a new building and new location in view, the American Craft Museum has decided to give itself a new name. Effective immediately, the institution is calling itself the Museum of Contemporary Arts and Design. This is the fourth time since its founding, in 1956, that it has tried to reinvent itself.

''We want to try to more accurately reflect what's going on in the art world today,'' said Holly Hotchner, the museum's director. ''The boundaries between art, design and craft have broken down. We view the word craft as a process of transforming materials, not a final object.''

Ms. Hotchner said the decision to become the Museum of Contemporary Arts and Design was prompted in part by changing public perceptions. ''To most people the word craft means hobby or fair,'' she said, ''with the added confusion that we have been on the same block as the American Folk Art Museum.'' (The American Folk Art Museum recently changed its name, too. Before June 2001 it was the Museum of American Folk Art.)

The announcement comes at a crucial time for the museum, which is currently situated at 40 West 53rd Street. This summer the city agreed to sell it 2 Columbus Circle, designed in 1965 by Edward Durell Stone as Huntington Hartford's Gallery of Modern Art and long vacant. The cost of purchasing and renovating the building, officials at the museum say, will exceed $30 million.

The building, a marble box punctuated by round holes on the south side of Columbus Circle, will most likely be torn down or greatly altered. The museum board recently announced four finalists in a competition among 11 architects competing for the job. They are Allied Works Architecture of Portland, Ore.; Zaha Hadid of London; and two New York firms, Toshiko Mori Architect and Smith-Miller & Hawkinson Architects.

The move will allow the museum to triple its space and, for the first time in its 46-year history, to display its permanent collection of 1,700 objects -- jewelry, ceramics, metals, fiber, glass, paper, wood and design objects -- that now sit in a Chelsea warehouse.

The change of name also comes at a time when the Museum of Modern Art, which boasts a design and architecture department that was founded in 1932, has decamped to small quarters in Queens until the expansion and renovation of its 53rd Street headquarters is complete, in 2005.

By calling itself the Museum of Contemporary Arts and Design, the institution is also out to give the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum a bit of competition. The Cooper-Hewitt, one of 16 museums under the Smithsonian Institution that has struggled for a higher profile among Manhattan's rivalrous museums, has contemplated changing its name to simply the National Design Museum. Paul Thompson, the Cooper-Hewitt's director, declined to discuss the Museum of Contemporary Arts and Design other than to say, ''I'm always delighted that design gets more into the public arena.''

At the Museum of Modern Art, Terence Riley, its chief curator of architecture and design, said he was not surprised by the news. ''It's all about a dissatisfaction with the word craft, which many people feel implies a lack of artistry.''

Alan Siegel, a member of the Museum of Contemporary Arts and Design's board, who is also the chairman and chief executive of Siegalgale, a brand identity firm in New York, called the word craft ''misleading, confusing and limiting.''

''Craft is associated with those shows you see on Columbus Avenue, and with cheap trinkets,'' he said. ''All museums are overlapping on each other's territory as everybody's trying to find their place.''

''Now that the museum has changed its name,'' he added, ''it has the challenge of making it stand for something.''