On Monday morning, the eminent New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz dipped his pen in poison and penned a searing open letter to MoMA imploring the museum to halt its controversial expansion plans. For anyone who hasn’t been following the story, those plans include the imminent demolition of the American Folk Art Museum (owned by MoMA), which would be replaced by new structures from starchitects (and modernist punctuation champions) Diller Scofidio + Renfro, most recently lauded in NYC for their redevelopment of Lincoln Center.

More details on the MoMA proposal, including images, can be found here. For the purposes of this post, I think it’s fair enough to define the new art exhibition spaces as slick glass boxes. This even includes the sculpture garden, which would actually go one step further than the enclosed structures by leaving one side completely open to West 54th Street. The intention is for passersby to be able to walk right into the sculpture garden, spontaneously and gratis, rather than paying an admission fee for access to what would traditionally be a walled-in area.