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The Whitney's third expansion plan in 20 years may be abandoned if it moves its addition to a site at the southern tip of the High Line. The space opened up after the Dia Art Foundation announced last week that it was not building a museum there.
The interesting backstory is the Renzo Piano-designed Madison Ave. addition, a nine-story tower that would have connected to the original 1966 Marcel Breuer building through glass bridges. Located in a historic district, the Whitney has been sparring with Upper East Side residents and preservationists, reports The New York Times' Robin Pogrebin.
It's taken the Whitney more than a year - and endless drafts - to get approval for the Piano design. Landmarks even asked that the new entrance be chopped in half to preserve a historic brownstone, one of several owned by the museum.
Staying uptown means a smaller exhibition space, from 30,000 to about 20,000 square feet, one of the reasons the museum is weighing the High Line option. Another reason for downtown: Being able to keep the Madison Avenue museum open, as an expansion would force it to be closed. And then there's the excavation - it's easier to build from the street than from behind a row of landmarked brownstones. Construction costs already have reached $200 million, pre-excavation.
In 1985, the Whitney spent $37 million on an expansion design by Michael Graves and in 2003, it shelled out $200 million for a Rem Koolhaas design that never saw the light of day. The Piano design may suffer the same fate.
And the Whitney will have to hustle if it wants to secure the downtown site.
All of a sudden, we're feeling kind of exhausted.
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how many historic brownstones does the city need?? we cant preserve everything.
They should move the whole museum and tell the UES to go screw itself.
And with that much in costs, will the Whitney be the first to crack the $30 admission barrier? I'm getting tired of paying for vanity projects of museum boards. The new MoMA is hideous. With all of the money in this town it would be nice if these museums were better endowed. I guess you can get a wing named after you but not the endowment.
these brownstones may be "historic" but the two that were to be torn down are decrepit, uninhabitable, and beyond repair. The Piano scheme merely calls for preserving the brownstones' facades and giving the illusion of preservation. Mostly the neighbors weren't as concerned with the historic character of the neighborhood as much as they were with a tall building "casting shadow onto their tomato plants". And I'm not making that up, someone really did say that. I was there. OK, so one person was genuinely concerned about inevitable damage to his house's foundation during excavation but I think he was bought off.
I wish these people would use their clout and money and put all their effort into something worthwhile like renewable energy sources, not a cultural institution using their legal right to expand a worldlcass museum that just happens to be two blocks from their house.
Crap.
Whoa there. You say:
"in 2003, it shelled out $200 million for a Rem Koolhaas design that never saw the light of day."
But today's Times has:
"Maxwell Anderson, the Whitney’s previous director, said the museum spent nearly $6 million in architectural, engineering and legal fees to develop the Koolhaas design."
That's a mighty big difference. Methinks your exhaustion set in before the last line.
Yes, apparently it did. The Koolhaas design would have cost $200 million and the Graves design was estimated at $37 million. Thanks for the heads up, JR.