Renzo Piano is too good an architect for his new Whitney Museum, in Manhattan’s meatpacking district, to be a total failure. The interior is, in general, quite good and surely a vast improvement over Marcel Breuer’s nuclear bunker on Madison Avenue, which housed the museum for half-a-century. And even aspects of the exterior of Piano’s building, taken piecemeal, are quite dexterously done. But seen from the outside and taken as a whole, the new Whitney is somewhat awful.
The main problem is a certain extremity of ugliness. In part, of course, that is the point, the postmodern, deconstructivist point. But it is not a good point or one that Lower Manhattan, with its abundance of inaesthetic buildings, especially needs to learn at this late date. Like the committed postmodernist that Piano sometimes is, the new Whitney, like many of his buildings, embodies an almost literary subtext. Seen from the north, its pale, soot-white façade recalls the industrial aesthetic of several Charles Sheeler paintings from the 1920s that are among the treasures of the Whitney’s collection. South and west, however, the massing and the cantilevered main entrance at Gansevoort and 10th Avenue allude (or so I believe) to that of Breuer’s old Whitney. And yet, there is no angle from which the new Whitney stacks up to create an impressive or definitive form. Big without being imposing, it has mass without presence. Say what you will of Frank Gehry’s varied projects, at least there is one angle from which they are apt to look good and to make sense, whatever unintentional chaos—as opposed to intentional chaos—ensues when one views them from any other angle.
The new Whitney is also quite different from the other projects that Piano has designed in recent years. Whether at the Morgan Library, the New York Times headquarters on 8th Avenue and 41st Street, or the contemporary wing of the Art Institute of Chicago, Piano has achieved a certain pristine classicism within the context of his pared-down neo-modernist vocabulary. Those are works of a consoling and elegant symmetry.
