Contract - June 2015 - 28

PHOTO: MEG WALTON

EDITORIAL

The New Whitney and New Ways of Seeing

Fittingly, the opening exhibition in the new Whitney Museum of
American Art is entitled, "America Is Hard to See." The museum (cover
and page 86), situated immediately adjacent to the West Side Highway
and the Hudson River, is inextricably a part of New York. Yet its fifth-floor
gallery windows gaze upon the Hudson River, and New Jersey and
mainland America beyond. Museumgoers pause to look up and look out,
to ponder and let their eyes wander, before returning to the gallery
interiors to survey the art.
The museum siting and the westward grand vista reminds one of
the Saul Steinberg drawing "View of the World from Ninth Avenue" (1976),
which was drawn initially for the cover of an issue of The New Yorker, has
been reproduced into countless posters, and has been wryly parodied.
You've seen it: The illustration depicts a world in which Manhattan is
drawn in great detail-it is the center of life-and the landscape past the
Hudson River to the Pacific and beyond is, well, not much.
For more than 80 years, the Whitney Museum has been focused
on American art, but with a very Manhattan sensibility and outlook: First
as a small museum in the middle of Greenwich Village, then a short stint
in Midtown, and finally on Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side for
the past five decades. In its last home-the inverted concrete-andgranite ziggurat by Marcel Breuer-the museum was not only hemmed
in but was decidedly inward looking. New Yorkers initially did not love
Breuer's Whitney, but grew to acknowledge it as the iconic Brutalist
home for American art. While writing favorably about the building in
general, Ada Louise Huxtable used the words bulky, gloomy, stygian,
and sunken to describe it in The New York Times when it opened in 1966.
Once past the imposing exterior, though, Breuer's Whitney was entirely
about the interiors and the art within. From inside, the opportunities to
look outside were rare. It was hard to see beyond Breuer's Whitney walls.
Fast-forward to this century, and after years of battling its Upper
East Side neighbors to potentially expand, the Whitney moved
downtown to a site that had languished as a forgotten corner. The
museum was able to purchase the city-owned Meatpacking District site

from the New York City Economic Development Corporation. On a block
once part of the meatpacking industry, and now immediately adjacent to
the few remaining meatpackers, the site is unusual for a major museum.
For those that know New York, think about it: Just 10 years ago, it would
have been hard to see a museum on this site.
The area was, in the not-so-distant past, defined by warehouse
buildings that were either empty or housing a few meatpackers, an
abandoned elevated rail line above, a wide highway to the west, and
sketchy side streets occupied by homeless and hookers with a few
trucks whizzing by. This was no place for respectable Upper East Side
art connoisseurs, let alone tourists. But things change.
Most of the warehouse-like buildings now house boutiques,
restaurants, clubs, and some of the priciest condos in the city. The
abandoned rail line is now the High Line, which attracted about 5.5
million visitors in 2014, and is being emulated worldwide. The High Line
passes under The Standard Hotel, which is now one of the hottest hotels
in the city. The hotel, the commerce, the High Line-and now the
Whitney-all took vision. Hard to imagine-hard to see-all of that just
a couple decades ago. To fully realize those visions, the role of architects
and designers was critical. And, more importantly, for this portion of the
city to be resilient with renewed vigor, it is architects and designers who
enabled others to see.
The new Whitney, symbolically, now has an outlook that is more
broad and expansive in its downtown home-part of a powerful
transformation for the institution itself and for the city. America is hard
to see, but it's resilient. The city and the new Whitney are both resilient.
And the museum is encouraging us to look with new ways of seeing.
Sincerely,
John Czarnecki, Assoc. AIA, Hon. IIDA
Editor in Chief

contractdesign.com

JUNE 2015

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Contract - June 2015

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