The Whitney opens May 1st 2015
99 Gansevoort St, New York, NY 10014
The Whitney has gone west. After 49 years squashed between the swish hotels and designer shops on Madison Avenue, America’s leading museum of its own art has finally outgrown its concrete cube. In need of more than just a bigger café, it has moved across and downtown, to the Meatpacking District, next door to the wildly successful High Line.
The new building, by Renzo Piano, is less space-age than you might expect. Piano’s creations, from the Shard in London to the Pompidou in Paris, tend to go against the grain with odd shapes, misleading angles and unfamiliar materials, but the new Whitney is more industrial. There are no voluptuous wiggles or colourful pipes that snake around the outside walls. Built from stone, reclaimed pinewood and low-iron glass, the building feels rigid and functional. But, like any good artist, Piano has responded to the setting and has created a stylish, asymmetrical form, in tune with the neighbourhood.
The inside is more unusual. Spread across 220,000 square feet, the museum is made up of indoor and outdoor galleries that flood it with light and life. The exhibition space has grown by a whopping 60%, so that works long locked in the vaults will be back where they belong, on the walls. The reopening exhibition is a sprawling display of the permanent collection, the biggest to date, with 650 works by 400 artists. “America is Hard to See” will show the diversity of American art since 1900, and “make a conscious effort to challenge assumptions”.
The main entrance on Gansevoort Street is close to the southern end of the High Line, so Piano has created a clever sequence of rooftop terraces and external walkways that double as vantage points over the park. There is an education centre, with classrooms, a theatre that opens onto the Hudson and a high-tech conservation lab—all new features for the Whitney. That’s what you get for $422m.
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