While battles over the fate of Tod Williams Billie Tsien’s American Folk Art Museum and other public buildings make headlines, the architecture world also faces a much bigger, but far less visible, challenge: preserving private homes when families who have protected them—sometimes for four decades or more—decide to sell.

A slew of high-profile architects and critics, including Annabelle Selldorf, Steven Holl, Wendy Evans Joseph, Thom Mayne, Richard Meier, Michael Sorkin, and Robert A.M. Stern, have joined the campaign to save the American Folk Art Museum building.

Five days after the Museum of Modern Art announced it would raze the former home of the American Folk Art Museum (which it purchased in 2011) for a planned expansion, the controversy continues to simmer.

In this issue of RECORD, we explore works of architecture as urban catalysts—buildings that raise the stakes for design in their neighborhoods while successfully engaging the surrounding context.

New York City’s American Folk Art Museum, designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien Architects and completed in 2001, has been sold to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) next door.