Buildings
West Side Storeys Thomas Wensing visits Renzo Piano’s new Whitney Museum in Manhattan Photos Nic Lehoux
Left The new Whitney Museum fronts onto Gansevoort Street, between the Hudson River and the High Line – the urban park built on a disused elevated spur of the 1930s New York Central Railroad. Containing substantially more exhibition space than the Whitney’s previous Marcel Breuer-designed home, the new building will show items from the its permanent collection of 19,000 works of modern and contemporary American art, as well as hosting temporary exhibitions. Below Clad in pale blue-grey steel panels, the eight-storey building is distinctly asymmetrical, stepping down with tiers of terraces and walkways to the east. View from across the Hudson River (ph: Timothy Schenck/Whitney); site model (ph: RPBW/Stefano Goldber/Publifoto).
The Whitney Museum’s move to its new building in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, designed by the Renzo Piano Building Workshop, ends the long saga to expand the institution. In the early 1980s Michael Graves was asked to design an extension to the Whitney’s 1966 Marcel Breuer building on Madison Avenue, and his three attempts were followed by similarly unsuccessful proposals by Rem Koolhaas (2001) and Renzo Piano (2004). This mother of all stalemates, created by local vested interests, landmark requirements and site constraints, is symptomatic of the combination of money and preservationism that guides or stifles development on the Upper East Side.
A breakthrough was finally made in 2004 when the city offered the Whitney a new location at the end of the High Line, north of the West Village. The move returns the Whitney to its roots; in 1918 Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Juliana Force opened the Whitney Studio Club on West 4th street, and in 1931 the first Whitney Museum opened in three rowhouses a few blocks to the south on West 8th Street. The new 20,000-square-metre building at 99 Gansevoort Street fulfils the need for more exhibition space, and adds a much needed collection of public, educational and curatorial spaces that have become so important to the operation of contemporary museums.
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