Archinect - News

Modellus Novus completes Frenchette Bakery redesign at the Whitney Museum of American Art

2023-11-10T12:07:00-05:00

Modellus Novus has completed its redesigned new Frenchette Bakery space at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.

The project replaces the museum’s closed original USHG Restaurant on the ground floor with a new café that serves as the first flagship for the popular West Side eatery, which opened in October of 2020.

The plan retains as much of the open concept intended by Renzo Piano for the new eight-year-old museum, confounding a sense of interiority to “create connections between diners and their surrounding community.” Artist Rashid Johnson’s site-specific installation New Grace completes the design, complementing a 70-foot central light fixture above the bar that's made from wood and rice paper.

Photo by Adrian Gaut, courtesy Modellus Novus

The Whitney says the Bakery will help recharge their improved food and beverage program and will be joined later by an eighth-floor space also designed by the firm for 2024. Modellus...

Johnston Marklee completes renovation of Roy Lichtenstein's studio into a new home for the Whitney Independent Study Program

2023-10-27T17:37:00-04:00

The Whitney Museum of American Art has shared news of a recently completed conversion project from Johnston Marklee in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan.

The former studio and home of famed New York School painter Roy Lichtenstein at 741/745 Washington Street is now the new permanent home for the Whitney’s 55-year-old Independent Study Program (ISP), which counts Donald Judd and Jenny Holzer among its many alumni.

Image courtesy Max Touhey

A new third level was added to the existing structure to accommodate the year-round slate of activities, creating an 11,000-square-foot space. The building also doubles as a host for the museum’s Education department in the summer when the ISP is out of session.

Image courtesy Filip Wolak

“Thanks to Roy, this building has been the site for artistic and intellectual endeavors, both for himself and for the people who have long gathered here. I can’t think of a more meaningful use for the studio than for the Whitney to carry his legacy f...

Sotheby's purchases Marcel Breuer's Brutalist Whitney for a rumored $100 million

2023-06-01T17:56:00-04:00

Sotheby’s said Thursday that it has purchased the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1966 Brutalist building by Marcel Breuer on Madison Avenue and will move its headquarters there from York Avenue in 2025. The deal — which Sotheby’s and the Whitney refused to confirm in response to queries from The Times in April — finally resolves the fate of the Breuer building, which has hung in the balance since the Whitney moved down to the meatpacking district in 2015.

The auction house will operate a rotating exhibition space out of the building — in addition to hosting live auctions — beginning in September 2024. There are no plans for the subterranean level restaurant at this time. The Frick Collection, which has been leasing the building since the Met walked away in March of 2020, will officially move back into its $160 million Selldorf Architects-renovated original East 70th Street location in the months prior.

The New York Times reported a source mentioning the deal, which was brokered between the current landlords Whitney Museum and Sotheby's, was worth approximately $100 million. Sotheby's CEO Charles F. Stewart explained to the paper that it was simply a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that we couldn’t pass up."

Weapons mogul resigns from Whitney Museum board amid artist revolt

2019-07-25T12:41:00-04:00

A vice chairman of the Whitney Museum of American Art stepped down on Thursday after months of protests over his company’s sale of tear gas, culminating in the withdrawal of eight artists last week from the prestigious Whitney Biennial exhibition.

The decision came days after London-based Forensic Architecture joined seven other artists in withdrawing from the 2019 Whitney Biennial exhibition.

Kanders struck a petulant tone in his resignation letter, saying, “The targeted campaign of attacks against me and my company that has been waged these past several months has threatened to undermine the important work of the Whitney,” adding, “I joined this board to help the museum prosper. I do not wish to play a role, however inadvertent, in its demise.”

Forensic Architecture withdraws from Whitney Biennial, citing evidence linking board member to violence in Gaza

2019-07-24T17:18:00-04:00

Forensic Architecture has announced its decision to withdraw from the 2019 Whitney Biennial. The London-based research group has also requested to replace its 10-minute video about the global spread of tear gas and bullets produced by companies linked to Whitney Museum vice chairman Warren Kanders, with new evidence they’ve found that directly links the weapons manufacturer to violence on the Israeli-Palestinian border in Gaza.

The fallout over the unethical business ties of certain members of the Whitney Museum of American Art's board of trustees continues unabated.

Forensic Architecture's decision to join seven other exhibitors in withdrawing from the prestigious 2019 Whitney Biennial exhibition comes as the art world questions the ethically-dubious funding that underpins some of the field's more coveted and valued institutions and events.

New York City's big art switcheroo involves The Met, The Frick, The Whitney, and a certain Marcel Breuer building

2018-09-21T19:01:00-04:00

Henry Clay Frick’s venerable Old Master paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints and porcelain seem destined for a change of scene. In an unusual game of musical chairs, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Frick Collection announced today (21 September) that the Met will vacate the Brutalist Breuer building on Madison Avenue in 2020. Its departure will make way for the Frick to move in late that year while its mansion undergoes a renovation and expansion five blocks away.

Click here to catch up with Archinect's coverage of the not entirely undramatic Frick Collection expansion saga.

What do museums have in common with prisons? More than you might think, according to artist Andrea Fraser

2016-02-25T17:37:00-05:00

The average crow takes less than two hours to travel from Sing Sing maximum-security prison to the Whitney Museum of American Art, institutions separated by just 32 miles of land along New York’s Hudson river. Yet few humans journey between them – museums and prison are at opposite ends of our society’s self-imaginings, and their populations tend not to intersect.

"The artist Andrea Fraser – provocateur, professor and performer who famously posed the question of whether art is, metaphorically, prostitution by sleeping with a collector on camera in Untitled (2003) – will focus on the relationship between galleries and jails in a new site-specific project opening at the Whitney on Friday."

Fraser, also known for her institutional criticism of Frank Gehry's Bilbao Museum, told the Guardian: "They’re really two sides of the coin of social inequality...Museums increasingly are warehouses of wealth, capturing surplus in the form of artworks that are no longer financially productive. Prisons are institutions that warehouse surplus labour and populations that have been economically excluded from the labour market."

Interested in other provocative art endeavors? Check out some of these links:

As the Met moves into the old Whitney, can it shrug off the iconic building's associations with its former tenant?

2016-02-16T17:13:00-05:00

On March 18, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art opens an annex at Madison Avenue and 75th Street in Manhattan, it will be attempting to shrug off the ghost of a museum past. The specter is the Whitney Museum of American Art, which called the iconic Marcel Breuer building on that corner home for nearly five decades. In an eight-year deal, the Met is leasing the Breuer building from the Whitney— which relocated to its dazzling new Renzo Piano–designed home last year...

The Breuer-designed building will house some of the Met's modern and contemporary collection. But shrugging off the association between the Brutalist masterpiece and its former tenant may prove a tough task. For many, nothing say's "the Whitney" more than those protruding windows...

For related coverage, check out some of these older articles:

Archinect's critical round-up for the new Renzo Piano-designed Whitney Museum

2015-04-21T18:33:00-04:00

With almost two weeks left before its public opening, the Whitney Museum of American Art’s new Renzo Piano-designed building is already shaping up to be one of the most talked-about buildings of the year. The 200,00 square-foot exhibition space is the long-awaited, and controversial, replacement of Marcel Breuer’s 1966 brutalist (and equally, if not more, controversial) Upper East Side masterpiece. Critical responses have already started proliferating across the Internet. Inevitably, most include comments on Piano’s precedent, as well as the drawn-out design process that included proposals by OMA and Michael Graves to expand Breuer’s original building.

Piano has designed more museums than probably any other contemporary architect: the Pompidou in Paris, the Menil Collection, two buildings at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. So far, many critics have commented that, with the new Whitney Museum, Piano is putting his experience to good use. The design can accommoda...

Protests at Renzo Piano's new Whitney Museum building

2015-04-15T17:59:00-04:00

The Whitney Museum of American Art has yet to open its doors in a new location in the meatpacking district, but on Tuesday night it unwittingly played host to its first radical art exhibition. At 11 p.m., activists from groups including Occupy Museums and Occupy the Pipeline gathered on the street in front of the museum for a performance art-style demonstration about a natural gas pipeline that is adjacent to the $422 million building and its vast art collection.

Supersized Whitney Museum prepares for May 1 opening – and the years after that

2015-04-02T13:53:00-04:00

The galleries are immense, the Renzo Piano design is arresting and the views of the Hudson River are expansive. As it prepares to open its new $422 million Lower Manhattan home on May 1, the Whitney Museum of American Art is pulsing with anticipation as it plans the inaugural events, including a neighborhood block party. But behind the scenes the museum is also preparing for the challenge of paying to operate a building that is three times as large as the old one.

Previously:

Whitney announces opening date of its new home in Chelsea

2014-11-20T13:55:00-05:00

The Whitney Museum of American Art announced today that it will open its new home in Chelsea on 1 May 2015. With double the exhibition space of its "old" Marcel Breuer-designed building, the museum will be able to show far more of its collection of Modern and contemporary American art in its Renzo Piano-designed new space in the Meatpacking District. [...] Weinberg told us that Piano saved the institution from making one decision that it would have lived to regret.

Previously

Whitney Museum to Offer Year of Free Admission to Construction Workers

2014-05-19T13:50:00-04:00

At a hard-hat tour of the Whitney’s Renzo Piano-designed building in downtown Manhattan earlier this month, it was announced that the institution plans to extend a year of museum membership to the project’s construction workers.

Edward Hopper’s "Nighthawks" as life-size installation at Flatiron Building

2013-08-16T17:02:00-04:00

In celebration of Hopper Drawing, a life-size window installation of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks (1942) is on view inside the landmark Flatiron Building's prow, one of the original architectural inspirations for the iconic painting. We recommend viewing it at sunset!

Follow the construction of Renzo Piano's new Whitney online

2012-10-22T18:45:00-04:00

Follow the progress of our new building in real time by watching our web camera, which documents the construction of the Whitney’s new home with an updated image every fifteen minutes.

NY's Whitney Museum Adds a New Shipping Container Art Studio Designed by LOT-EK

2012-05-16T10:42:00-04:00

This week the Whitney Museum inaugurated a brand new exhibition and studio space designed by shipping container architects-extraordinaire LOT-EK. An ultra-modern and eco-friendly addition to complement the museum's 1960s concrete brutalist construction, the new structure was commissioned by the Whitney as a space where the museum could hold special exhibits and house activities for the Whitney education program.

More about the project here.

Now that's a pun(ny) title

2011-05-31T22:38:00-04:00

Whether or not the Whitney was wise to migrate, the design suggests that it has misperceived its future neighborhood, a formerly run-down area where mottled brick, painted iron, and salvaged wood are still pleasingly rough. The district’s architecture of the past decade has put a sophisticated gloss on this neighborhood’s industrial past.

In a essay entitled An Out-of-Tune Piano, Justin Davidson argues that the plans for the Renzo Piano designed, new downtown Whitney is a monumental lost opportunity. He believes that the current proposed design is too uptight and does not fit the spirit of the neighborhood. Davidson writes, "The result is MoMA South, a thoroughly corporate museum—airy, spacious, efficient, and utterly sterile."