The new Whitney Museum, at Gansevoort and Washington Streets in New York City, sits at the southern end of the High Line and is designed to merge seamlessly with the elevated green space.
It was 1981, and it was finally happening. The Whitney Museum of American Art, sited on New York City’s Upper East Side in the iconic Marcel Breuer-designed building first completed in 1965, had successfully acquired the five town houses south of its location on Madison Avenue. After nearly 16 years, the institution had the room and was expanding with help from renowned architect Michael Graves. There was just one problem: the residents of the neighborhood and the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission took issue with Graves’s eccentric, layered design that would knock down the brownstones in the Whitney’s historic district. After three revisions, the plans sputtered, and the museum tabled them around 1986.
Fast-forward to 1999, and once again the Whitney began to entertain ideas of expansion. Its board worked with Rem Koolhaas, who conceived a space-age design that could reach up and over the area’s brownstones. But, before the plan could get past the proposal stage, the events of September 11, 2001, pushed the museum to scrap it entirely.
By this point, the Whitney, whose total number of collected pieces had reached well into five digits, was desperate for more space, so it began a third expansion discussion in 2003, this time with Renzo Piano. His plans made it past community-board and Landmarks Preservation Commission reviews, but the gains they offered the Whitney seemed negligible compared to their price tag, and the museum’s board was thus left debating whether to proceed with them.
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