A rendering of the new Whitney Museum, which broke ground in the Meatpacking District in May and is set for completion in 2015.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.
There are a number of reasons for the museum’s move. For most of the time that it’s been on the Upper East Side, (and surely since the mid-1980s), the Whitney has desperately wanted to expand. Like many New Yorkers, the Whitney is a packrat who has simply run out of closet space — its collections, which comprised some 2,000 works in 1966, have now grown to more than 19,000. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art has finalized a deal to lease the Breuer building to house its modern and contemporary art collections once the Whitney moves out.) More than anything, however, there is an unquantifiable, almost metaphysical sense of “location, location, location” that drew the Whitney to its new home in the Meatpacking District. Back in 1966, New York’s art world was limited to 57th Street and Madison Avenue. Now, the action is mainly centered in Chelsea, within walking distance of where the new Whitney — scheduled for completion in 2015 — will rise.
Renzo Piano, the architect responsible for the new building, practically invented gentrification-through-museums when, in 1977, he and Richard Rogers designed the Centre Pompidou in the 4th arrondissement of Paris, a project that injected new life into one of the more depressed sections of the city. This time, however, the tables are turned: The Whitney is going to arrive in the Meatpacking District long after gentrification has taken hold there.
Indeed, it’s precisely because of that gentrification that the Whitney wants to be there.
Perhaps the museum could have stayed on the Upper East Side. It certainly tried to make a go of the Breuer building for more than a generation after its inadequacies became clear. But thanks to the injudicious, not to mention meddlesome, interference of the Landmarks Preservation Committee, as well as the reflexive and unreflecting resistance of many Upper East Siders, all hopes of expansion were crushed, first when a Michael Graves-designed expansion did not fly in 1985, and again in the past decade, when a Renzo Piano-designed expansion failed.
The Landmarks Preservation Committee’s requirement that the Whitney jump through hoops to preserve a few thoroughly worthless brownstones denied the museum any chance to create an important architectural statement that would have enhanced the streetscape of the Upper East Side. Real estate considerations, obviously, have influenced the shape and design of office towers and residential developments for generations in New York City. But the new Whitney may be the first museum in which these values have been integral to the design. According to the renderings, the outdoor café will spread out under the shadow of the High Line to the east, while the terrace to the west will look over the Hudson, with spectacular views that museum officials describe in the same terms in which a developer might describe a condominium. All of which is by way of saying that, almost as important as the response to the form of the building, is the public’s yearning response to its enviable location.
The building, which promises to be three times larger than the Marcel Breuer monolith, will include an 18,000-square-foot gallery for special exhibitions, making it the largest column-free museum gallery in the city, according to a news release.
In addition, there will be two floors for displaying the permanent collection, thus transforming the museum from what it is today — primarily a receptacle for mounting transient shows — to a backward-looking stage for the exhibition of older art. The top floor will contain a space for contemporary artists’ projects; between it and the permanent collection space they will represent an additional 32,000 square feet.
Meanwhile, as has been indicated, along Gansevoort Street a cantilevered entrance will cover an 8,500-square-foot outdoor plaza directly in front of the High Line. Other features are a black-box theater, a 170-seat auditorium, a library, a conservation lab and a restaurant operated (as always, it would seem) by Shake Shack guru Danny Meyer.
On the basis of the somewhat insufficient renderings, the design for the new Whitney appears to be pale and extensively glazed over. It exemplifies the industrial aesthetic that has informed Piano since the Centre Pompidou, but that has become far more refined and effective in recent years.
Museum officials have called the project “sculptural” and that seems to be a good description. The problem is that Piano is not really a sculptor among architects, as Frank Gehry and Rem Koolhaas are. Rather he is a draftsman: In his more recent practice he has conceived his buildings in terms of fairly simple, even classical volumes that have been enlivened by interesting surface treatments both in visual and tactile terms.
That is to say that he conceives his buildings more in two dimensions than in the three dimensions that are the natural province of sculpture. A perfect example is the New York Times Building, completed in 2007. Structurally, it is as sheer and simple as the Seagram Building, though its surface has been evocatively corrugated almost along its entire height and it has a few spindly, Gothic ornaments on the top. What it’s lacking is any sense of inventive volume, and that’s precisely the quality that the new building on Gansevoort Street seeks to supply.
Based on the renderings (it might work better on completion) it’s sundry asymmetries merely look awkward, rather than daring, as the structure juts out unexpectedly both in the front and the back. It seems quite clear that the complex functionality of the building — as well as the demands of real estate — have turned Piano in directions where he’s less sure of himself.
If, as suggested, the new Whitney intimately reflects the values of the real estate market, it will also, of course, have a profound effect upon them. The new developments along the High Line are already seeing their values rise. When the Whitney opens among them in four short years, the asking prices will increase further.