The folk art museum was at 45 West 53rd Street, above, a property now owned by MoMA. MoMA is preserving the panels, which are three-eighths of an inch thick and hung on a supporting armature. Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Contrary to what you may have read lately, the Museum of Modern Art is intent on carefully preserving the former American Folk Art Museum next door.

At least, the part of it that is most recognizable to the public: an 82-foot-high sculptural ensemble of 63 panels, cast in a gorgeous copper-bronze alloy, each panel different from those around it. Some look like lunar landscapes, others like lava flows. They are arrayed in three planes that fold into one another as a palm would crease when closing.

Together, the panels compose the principal facade of the folk art building at 45 West 53rd Street. From 2001 to 2011, they were the face of the institution. And, since the financially troubled museum withdrew from Midtown to a smaller space near Lincoln Center, the somber facade has served as a memorial to itself, one of the first significant works of 21st-century architecture in New York, by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects.

MoMA, which has owned the folk art property since 2011, said last month that it was unable to find a productive way to preserve the building, despite strenuous efforts by the architectural firm Diller Scofidio & Renfro to devise a structural and programmatic marriage between the folk art museum and abutting MoMA space.

The 63 panels making up the facade of the American Folk Art Museum were cast in a copper-bronze alloy. Each is different. David W. Dunlap/The New York Times

The seeming inevitability of demolition has undoubtedly conjured images among the building’s admirers of wrecking crews tearing apart the facade and tossing the 10-foot panels into waiting Dumpsters. (Next stop: eBay.)

That is not the plan.

“We will take the facade down, piece by piece, and we will store it,” Glenn D. Lowry, the director of the Museum of Modern Art, said in an interview last week. “We have made no decision about what happens subsequently, other than the fact that we’ll have it and it will be preserved.”

Alberto Cavallero, a principal in Diller Scofidio, said the facade was “very amenable to disassembly” since the panels, three-eighths of an inch thick, are hung on a supporting armature. They will be wrapped for storage, he said.

Replacing the folk art building will be a structure, still in conceptual design, that will link existing MoMA galleries to the east with space that MoMA is to occupy at the base of an abutting residential tower that is being planned immediately to the west.

If MoMA thinks the folk art facade is worth preserving, as it does, and if the facade can be supported on a free-standing armature, as it can, the question naturally arises: Why not re-erect the panels where they stand now?

That would be a “token gesture to a history,” the architect Elizabeth Diller said in an interview at her firm’s office in the Starrett-Lehigh Building.

“We think of buildings synthetically,” she said. “Facades and buildings and their organization, their logic, are tied entirely together.”

The panels that make up building's facade will be salvaged and preserved, even as the building itself is torn down. David W. Dunlap/The New York Times

“You either have the integrity of a building, with all its intelligence and connected ideas, or you don’t,” she said. “But if you just detach a symbol of what it meant — away from its body, its logic, its intelligence — it feels very empty.”

Mr. Williams, who designed the folk art museum with Ms. Tsien, seemed almost to have anticipated the issue in a 2001 interview with Architectural Record. “Everyone in the press will talk about the panels because they’re out front,” he said. “But the building will be important not because of the panels but because of the space-making inside.”

It’s probably safe to say that no one associated with the folk art museum is interested in the facade being turned into an elaborate appliqué.

“It would be a kinder fate for the museum facade to be at Storm King, as the front of an imaginary building in an enclosure of fresh air, than to be buried in storage for the foreseeable future,” said Darcy Miro, the artist who collaborated on the facade with Mr. Williams and Ms. Tsien. The Storm King Art Center is in the Hudson Valley. The panels were cast at the Tallix fine-arts foundry in Beacon, N.Y.

“It would be a mistake to just use it as adornment,” Ms. Miro said. “Maybe, as metal, it was always meant to go back to the land and leave the city.”

Trade Center Suit Is Dismissed

On Nov. 14, Building Blocks described a lawsuit brought against the Police Department by residents of Lower Manhattan who were fearful that the security plan for the area around the World Trade Center would leave their neighborhood in “fortresslike isolation,” principally by closing streets to unauthorized vehicles.

Justice Margaret A. Chan of State Supreme Court in Manhattan dismissed the suit on Feb. 4. “With the new W.T.C. plan, a pedestrian can walk across Fulton Street that was previously closed off by the former W.T.C. towers,” she wrote in her decision.

“There are no ‘walls’ to speak of that would isolate the W.T.C. site from its neighboring areas. The only features that are somewhat uninviting are the security measures such as the sally ports and police security checkpoints.”

Daniel Alterman, a lawyer for the residents’ group, said, “We will review the decision and will discuss with our client the possible next legal step.” A spokesman for the city’s Law Department said he would have no comment on the decision.

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