Description

Since its opening in 1966 on the Upper West Side, the striking building of the Whitney Museum, designed by Marcel Breuer, has been a magnet for visitors. However, only a fraction of the collection could be seen there at any one time, and many of its most prized works by artists such as Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe were only temporarily on display, not to mention the large post-war paintings by the New York School. For almost two decades, a series of proposals for resolving the shortage of space were discussed, before the option of extending the original museum was ultimately shelved as unfeasible.

In 2008, the decision was made to move to a completely different area. A suitable site was found in Gansevoort Street near the busy 14^th Street in the Meatpacking District on the west side of the island. The district had shot to sudden attraction with the building of the High Line, the raised greened boardwalk that runs the length of a former elevated railway line and now extends as far as 34^th Street.

In addition to its general space requirements, the new museum would primarily need large column-free spaces including a tall gallery space for the large-format contemporary works of art. Unlike Marcel Breuer’s introverted concrete cube, this museum should open onto the neighbourhood, i.e. onto the predominantly gritty industrial buildings of the surroundings. Renzo Piano embraced the situation, adopting the same spirit, though not the details, he had used previously for his “machine for culture”, the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Three vast ventilation stacks protrude out of the roof of the nine-storey building, which descends in height along its narrow side in a series of staggered terraces to the west, each lined with simple metal railings. It’s hard to grasp the entire additive configuration of the building at once, an impression that is probably intentional: instead it looks as if some new kind of cargo ship has just moored at the nearby Hudson River. On the east side of the busy West Side Highway, a vast window the breadth of the entire building signals the presence of the building’s largest gallery, which runs the length of the building from west to east. Elsewhere, windows are less frequent and have been carefully positioned to maximise the amount of hanging space. The narrowing of the building towards the top is expressed by the incline of the its powder-coated steel façade and the gradually receding stepped terraces. The offices and special functions such as a restoration workshop and graphics collection are arranged at the rear of the building, where they benefit from light from the north.

The ground floor is glazed on three sides and houses a shop, the reception desks and a restaurant as well as a dining bar with a long counter that can be used independently of the museum’s opening hours, adding to the appeal of the area and its many culinary attractions. While the full-height glazing reduces the boundary between the street and interior to a minimum, the slight incline in the terrain necessitates occasional steps, creating the slightest semblance of the traditional motif of the museum as a temple on a plinth.

On the narrow, eastern side, where the High Line ends abruptly in front of the building, there are windows, or rather glass doors, on all floors – that also provide access to the terraces. A café shares the top floor with the smallest of the gallery spaces.

In the last twenty years alone, the collection has grown from 2,000 to 22,000 pieces as the Museum welcomed a flood of contemporary art. Under the title “America is hard to see”, a quotation by the poet Robert Frost, some 600 works are spread over four gallery levels, chronologically arranged from top to bottom, beginning with the oldest items dating back to the 1920s – the museum was founded in 1930 by the wealthy art enthusiast Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney – and progressing to the large hall with contemporary art, which at 1,675 m² is the largest column-free exhibition space in New York.

The works themselves, which were still small in the 1920s and ‘30s, have likewise grown in size. The new building can now accommodate much larger canvases such as “The Seasons”, a more than five-metre-long painting by Lee Krasner from 1957. On the third floor there is a multifunctional hall for film, video, and performance – art forms that epitomise the 20^th century like no other. And then you’re back in the lobby, wondering what happened to the 20,500 m² of gross floor area – only 4,600 m² of which is exhibition space – and how the construction costs could have reached an extraordinary 422 million dollars.

The costs are, however, partly explained by special technical requirements, such as a flood protection system that was decided on after Hurricane “Sandy” highlighted its exposed location, barely a hundred metres from the Hudson. It was also necessary to anchor the building on firmer bedrock fifteen metres below ground so that it cannot be driven up by groundwater or flooding in this district, which is built on land that has been reclaimed over the past two centuries. Renzo Piano’s ship metaphor was evidently not intended in such a literal sense.

Originally published in Bauwelt 22.2015, pp. 22-29, abridged and edited for Building Types online, translated by Julian Reisenberger

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