The New York Times In a New Museum, a Blue Period By William L. Hamilton Thursday, March 11, 1999 WHEN was the last time you loved a building and It loved you back? This month, the Museum of Sex, or MoSex, sweeps the floor of its new home at 233 Fifth Avenue (27th Street), beneath the shadow of the Empire State Building, in anticipation of renovations that will deliver a new facade, 12,000 square feet of in galleries and offices, a shop and a cafe by the end of the year. If the for-profit institution makes money - no Federal funding didn't even ask, thanks - it will break ground In two years on a 35,000-square-foot, seven-story building for the same site designed by Shop, a team of five young New York architects. They intend the new museum, with its translucent, peep-show tease of a facade and its sinuous, soft-focus interiors, to be a sensual as well as an architectural experience. Forget the high-school field trips to the Greek Pottery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the dioramas in the Hall of Biology at the American Museum of Natural History and Fragonard's French swingers at the Frick Collection. Mosex - at the other end of the block from Le Trapeze, a towels-only nightclub - is an adult museum, the first in the United States to be devoted to "sex and culture everywhere " said Alison Maddex, 32, who is directing the project with Daniel Gluck, 30, an investor. "It's going to he the Smithsonian of sex," she said, adding that it would not exclusively present a history of the sex industry nor would it be an excuse for exhibiting a collection of curiosa. But, Ms. Maddex said, Mosex will be "pro-free speech and anti-censor-ship, basically an R-rated museum, like an R-rated film." Young people unaccompanied by adults will be carded at the door. Mosex will need 100,000 visitors annually, paying an admission fee of $6.50, to break even and 400,000 visitors each year for two years, to meet the budget for constructing the new building, Mr. Gluck said. (By comparison, the Guggenheim SoHo drew 119,121 visitors last year.) At Shop's East 37th Street office, Ms. Maddex wearing a black Todd Oldham twin set and a share pleated satin skirt, paced the loft's blond wood floor, squeezing numbers into a cellular telephone as though it were a muscle-toning device. She and Mr. Gluck appear too busy pushing Mosex's big picture lo be specific about what and how it will do what It does when It does it. The museum's initial installation is to be a time line, of "Sex in America," from the Puritans to cybersex, including Items like Colonial bundling chairs, which measured compatibility between couples who were roped together, and electronic kiosks with touch screes like A.T.M.'s. The practical assumption is that fascination with Mosex' subject will propel a kind of perpetual self-promotion while it picks up the details, like names on napkins at a cocktail party. Instead of a collection, there will be a study center and a database to catalogue the whereabouts of archives of erotica. There will be revolving curatorial Participation from invited guests and members of Ms. Maddex's board of advisers, or "sex think tank," as she called it. It includes Camille Paglia, who is Ms. Maddex's partner; Mr. Oldham; Robert Francoeur, a professor of biological sciences at Fairleigh Dickinson University, and Sandra Bernhard, the actress. For now, the design is an elegant sales tool. Lately, Ms. Maddex and Mr. Gluck have been previewing the proposed building, a vertical stack of glass and plastic facades. Transparent and translucent panels, stretched like skin across steel frames, will undulate like a torso in motion, seductively silhouetting the galleries for the street and creating flirtatious shadows and light for visitors inside. It was important to the architects that Mosex be open looking, as though it were actually open-minded - as clear-sighted as glass, which will be its principal material. "That was critical, that it was understood as something that wasn't behind a dark, dingy door, that there was no shame in entering," said Gregg Pasquarelli, a partner in Shop The thin building is essentially a sandwich of planes; seen from the side, the multiple facades look like flaky pastry. The glass and plastic resin panels, cobbled to steel frames, form walls that recede, like epidermal layers, from the street to the back of the site, creating Mosex' interior galleries, halls and stairs as they fall into place. The play of dim and bright, of suggestion and sight, between the skins creates an architectural encounter that the designers hope will mimic a sexual one - part Salome's veils, part video pause, a slow kaleidoscopic come-on. "That to us was what sexuality was about," Mr. Pasquarelli said. "Sexuality is an ambiguous, fluid series of relationships." "It doesn't look like sexuality," he said of Mosex. "It performs like sexuality." The building will not be without its unexpected modesty, too. Because of its softly cobbled glass surfaces, "it will blush," said Christopher Sharples, a partner in Shop, as the sun or a cloud drifts across it, or as lights go on for the evening. Showing off the Mosex model at Shop, Ms. Maddex nailed her non-Platonic enthusiasm for the architecture an the spot, "It's definitely voyeuristic," she said. "It's like when you can me through the curtain into the shower." Then she and Mr. Gluck left the office quickly and leapt into a cab on Third Avenue at 6 in the evening - Ms. Maddex was extremely good at getting it - and headed crosstown. Mosex has been an idea in search of an institution since 1997. "There's a story about how we know each other," Mr. Gluck said in the text. "We both went gity of Pennsylvania School of Fine Arts. We dated the same..." Ms. Maddex, applying ultra-brown lipstick, nodded her head firmly from left lo right and back again, "OK," Mr. Gluck said and stopped. Moses has had its lawyers look carefully into Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's 1995 law requiring a 500-foot zone between adult businesses and churches and schools, "We're in a gray zone that's O.K. for a sex shop, even though we're not one," Mr. Gluck said. His principal Involvement has been putting together promises for $1.3 million, most of which is now in hand from private investors, he said, "none in the adult industry." While acknowledging that they might be walking a fine line In conservative minds, Ms. Maddex explained that Moses expected no Problems presenting K-rated content In Its neighborhood, with educational, not prurient, intent and without Federal or state funding. Live performances, about which she was not specific. might make the occasional museum event triple-X. Mosex intends to be provocative, Ms. Maddex said, but has no interest in baiting the powers that be. Jennifer Chait a spokeswoman for the Mayor's office, sale] the city would shut the museum down if it made a wrong move. Ms. Maddex dropped Mr. Gluck off at the, Mosex building, then headed south. "It's not going to be just a dry trip through history, sexuality as in gender studies or this whole kind of pseudo-analytical stuff, but real sex. Human drive. We want it to be very fun and alive." Is the public ready? Ms. Maddex, arriving at her destination, told the driver to pull to the left. "Hold that thought," she said at the door, then jumped.