A rendering of the new Whitney MuseumFrom the July issue: All museums, like buildings in general, have a real estate dimension. From the simple act of purchasing the lot on which the museum will rise to the structure’s interaction with the buildings that surround it, a museum is part of the urban fabric. As such, it bespeaks the attitudes and acquisitiveness of the citizens whom it serves.
But the new $680 million Whitney Museum building, which broke ground on May 26 on Gansevoort Street between West and Washington streets along the High Line, seems more intimately and also more insistently in touch with this real estate element than perhaps is true of any other museum to date.
The Whitney — which this year celebrates its 80th anniversary — is moving from the granite citadel that Marcel Breuer designed on Madison Avenue and 75th Street, a Brutalist building that it has inhabited since 1966. [more]
