After 25 years of false starts, the board of the Whitney Museum of American Art has taken a step that will redefine the 80-year-old institution. It voted on Tuesday afternoon to begin construction on a building in the meatpacking district in Manhattan, to be completed by 2015, that will vastly increase the size and scope of the museum.
The site near the High Line in the meatpacking district where the Whitney Museum of American Art plans to break ground next year. The downtown Whitney will be a six-story building.
The New York Times
The board also agreed to sell a group of brownstones adjacent to the museum’s signature Marcel Breuer-designed building on Madison Avenue and East 75th Street, and the museum’s annex building around the corner on 74th Street. The sale will effectively end any chance of the Whitney expanding in its current space, where it has been since 1966 and which it has been trying to enlarge since the architect Michael Graves unveiled the first of many expansion plans in 1985.Without room to grow uptown, and without the income necessary to run two museums, the Whitney now faces the question of what to do with the Breuer building — which may end up being shared, at least temporarily, by another institution, perhaps the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Certainly such an alliance would lighten the Whitney’s financial burden. So far the board has raised about $372 million toward the downtown project, which it estimates will cost $680 million, a figure that includes construction and endowment. The sale of the brownstones and the annex building is expected to raise about $100 million more. The vote to break ground downtown — and the choice of holding it so close to the planned site — were the latest in a series of moves that have been carefully choreographed by board members who saw the new building as the Whitney’s last chance to grow after so many failed efforts at expansion. The Whitney has been struggling with space issues for decades. When it moved to the Breuer building, there were 2,000 works in its collection — a number that has since grown to about 18,000 — but there is only enough room to show about 150 works from its permanent holdings at one time. Many larger works in the collection have never been displayed because of the lack of space. The downtown Whitney, designed by Renzo Piano, will be a six-story, 195,000-square-foot metal-clad building, with a dramatic cantilevered entrance. It will include more than 50,000 square feet of indoor galleries and 13,000 square feet of rooftop exhibition space, as well as classrooms, a research library, art conservation labs and a multi-use indoor/outdoor space for film, video and performance art. It will also include a restaurant, cafe and bookstore. Most important, in Whitney's director Weinberg’s view, “it will have one of the largest column-free spaces to show art in New York.”
