LOST IN SPACE
The Whitney Museum reopened two months ago in new expanded digs in the Meatpacking District, a colossus designed by Renzo Piano on Gansevoort Street that spans Tenth and Ninth Avenues. It has huge column-free galleries on its fifth through eighth floors, picture windows on its west facade with views to the Hudson River, staggered
balconies on its east facade with views to the Highline, and an open glass-walled lobby that doubles as a public plaza.
It’s hard, from outside, to get a clear sense of the building. From Fourteenth Street its decks and railings gives it it the feeling of an approaching luxury liner. From Tenth Avenue it looks like a postmodern playhouse, a precarious stack of seven smaller volumes finished in different materials. The Gansevoort Street facade, where one enters, is dominated by the sloping hull of the gallery spaces that’s cantilevered above. This immense, inert mass is wrapped in blank green-grey metal panels that give no scale or sense of the interior.
And it’s hard, from inside, to get a clear sense of the building. The visitors’ pamphlet shows a building cross section rather than floor plans, suggesting that, like the old Whitney, it’s a vertical museum, experienced floor-by-floor. But there’s no hierarchy or variety in the gallery floors – they’re all the same. And there’s no element tying them together, like the iconic concrete stair in the old
building. The ceremonial stair at the new building reaches from the ground floor to the fifth and then, abruptly, stops.
The new Whitney is a super-large building that feels as if it’s been conceived in small moments, without any central organizing principle. Many of its details are exuberant and exquisite: the staggered patio decks and runs of railings, the high glass curtain wall at the sidewalk cafe, the attenuated steel posts that support the cantilevered gallery floors, the punched ship windows at third floor study rooms. But the building has no heart. One walks through it searching for the vantage point from which all its operations make sense, and just can’t find it.
Photograph by Ed Lederman, courtesy of the Whitney Museum.