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.
At the new Whitney, however, Piano has chosen a willfully imperfect and asymmetrical arrangement of forms that nevertheless accumulate to create a menacing, box-like mass. It is almost as though the architect had returned to the aesthetics, or anti-aesthetics, of his earliest success: the Centre Pompidou in Paris (designed with Sir Richard Rogers) whose industrial vocabulary bristled with similarly willful irregularities.
The interior, however, is a great improvement over the old Whitney. One went to the Breuer building out of a sense of lugubrious duty. Although it was not without some virtues, like so much modernist architecture it lacked a certain experiential fineness. One never felt happy or entirely comfortable being there, and nothing looked especially good. There was something dank and dismal about that bare, reinforced concrete with its aggressive professions of honesty and aesthetic probity. Of the hundred exhibitions I saw and reviewed in the older building, only one struck me as beautifully installed: The great Agnes Martin retrospective of 1992. On that occasion you had the sense, as you often have in the Metropolitan Museum or at the National Gallery in Washington, that the art and the rooms in which it was placed had coalesced into a seamless and satisfying whole.
There is more chance of that in the exhibition spaces of the new structure. These take up much of the building’s eight stories and vastly expand the area available for the display of special exhibitions and the permanent collection: 50,000 square feet of interior space and 13,000 for outdoor space. The wooden floors—recycled from the nearby piers on the Hudson—give a satisfyingly organic feel to the whole thing, and the lighting has a warm and caressing quality that makes the art, whether by Edward Hopper, Mark Rothko, Andy Warhol, or Jeff Koons, look about as good as it ever will.
If there is any criticism to be made of these spaces, it is that they lack a certain specialness or idiosyncrasy. After exhaustive calibrations on the part of the architect, in consultation with the curators and the director and the trustees and god knows whom else, the result looks essentially like every other equally expensive gallery in 50 other contemporary art venues that have arisen in the past decade, most obviously those of the Museum of Modern Art, as it was reconceived by Yoshio Tanaguchi in 2004. This is not to deny that these interior spaces do their job very well. It should also be said that visitors will rejoice in the elevators, a great improvement over those of the Breuer building, which came about as frequently as the C train on a weekend (not very frequently).
When all is said and done, however, there is something very strange about the new Whitney building, and it goes far beyond the relative merits of its interior or exterior. One begins to suspect that the building exists in part—perhaps in largest part—not for its function or for the space that it occupies or contains, but for the space that it looks out on.
Along the western side of the building, beyond the galleries and beyond any functioning of the museum itself, are spectacular views of the Hudson River. On the eastern side there is a complex of stairways running up and down the facade, offering what are known in the local real estate market as “city views,” views of New York in all its glorious and inimitable New Yorkness.
In a similar spirit, the High Line, an abandoned railway that was recently converted to a park, comes to its glorious end at the foot of the new building, into which it funnels thousands of enraptured French and German tourists. In the process, the entire building recalls a typology known to the Renaissance as a belvedere, the point of which was not located in the structure itself but in what it looked out upon. Whereas the old Whitney was nearly windowless, the new Whitney is almost all windows and terraces on every floor. It is the view that is the real draw of the new Whitney. Money, as everyone knows, has become fully integrated into our appreciation of the visual arts: It is impossible to look at the Warhols or Rothkos or Koonses on view in the Whitney without thinking of the staggering sums they command at auction. But now there is a newer dimension to this mass vulgarity, something that we might call the real estate reflex.
Few visitors to the new Whitney, and surely no New Yorkers, are ignorant that those views of the Hudson and Midtown, and that precious proximity to the High Line, would cost $10 million or $50 million or even $100 million for one of the new condominiums that have lately appeared on the market. But now at the Whitney, $22 will permit even the most indigent members (of the middle-class, of course) to rent those views for the space of an hour or two and, thus, to experience the full and powerful spiritual elevation that our ancestors, bless their hearts, once derived from art itself.
James Gardner is the author of the forthcoming Buenos Aires: The Biography of a City (Palgrave Macmillan).
