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...

Frick Collection to vacate Marcel Breuer's 945 Madison Avenue building by next year

2023-04-24T17:53:00-04:00

The Frick Collection will vacate its Brutalist temporary home on New York’s Madison Avenue and return to Henry Clay Frick’s historic Fifth Avenue mansion in 2024. [...] The fate of the Breuer building—which was for decades the home of the Whitney Museum of American Art and, following that museum’s relocation to the Meatpacking District, a temporary outpost of the Metropolitan Museum of Art dubbed the Met Breuer—is unknown.

“Our residency at Frick Madison has been rewarding and productive, and we look forward to the remaining months of our time at 945 Madison Avenue, as we continue to gain new insights into our collection by seeing it reframed in this unprecedented way,” the Frick’s director Ian Wardropper said in an announcement.

The museum replaced The Met two years ago following that institution’s own ill-fated five-year run that ended in the spring of 2020. The Frick now expects its return to the original 1 East 70th Street location in March of next year after Selldorf Architects’ contested $160 million refresh. As The Art Newspaper reported, the future tenant (and owner) of 945 Madison currently remains in doubt while its current landlord, the Whitney Museum, looks for answers.

New York City as the world's biggest apartment

2020-03-09T13:28:00-04:00

Artists Sam Lavigne and Tega Brain and the Whitney Museum of American Art have collaborated to produce New York Apartment 2020, a mesmerizing website experience that "advertises a fictitious New York City apartment for sale that covers more than 300 million square feet and spans the five boroughs."

The piece, which exists as an interactive website, combines thousands of real estate listings into one massive aggregated apartment that features 65,764 bedrooms and 55,588 bathrooms. The mega-apartment clocks in at a cozy 36,672,535 square feet in size.

According to project text showcased on the Whitney Museum website, the artwork "collapses the high and low ends of the market, architectural periods and styles, and neighborhoods and affordability into a single space that cumulatively creates a portrait of New York's living spaces and the real estate market."

Screenshot of New York Apartment 3D virtual tour. Image courtesy of The Whitney Museum of American Art.

For the project, the artis...

What about the developers who love—and love to donate to—Donald Trump?

2019-08-12T17:02:00-04:00

The billionaire real estate developer whose support for President Trump sparked calls for a consumer boycott is also behind one of the flashiest redevelopment projects coming to downtown Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles Times points out that Stephen M. Ross, the controversial real estate developer and investor behind Related Companies, luxury gyms Equinox and SoulCycle, and other business interests, is also a driving force behind The Grand, a Frank Gehry-designed mega-project slated for Downtown Los Angeles.

Ross's business interests have recently taken a hit as news of the developer's plans to host a $250,000-a-seat fundraiser for President Donald Trump came to light just days after a white suprematist gunman evoked the president's own words before killing 22 people in El Paso, Texas. Nearly all of the victims in the shooting were either Mexican Americans or Mexican nationals, according to The Los Angeles Times, and the tragedy is widely seen as a direct and racially motivated attack on those communities, as a result.

Ross's political activities—and the consumer-focused business investments that fuel those activities—have come under fire as other elements of society, particularl...

Marcel Breuer and the Invention of Heavy Lightness

2018-06-12T23:18:00-04:00

How could an architect who had made the pursuit of lightness the essence of his design aspirations become one of the great form-givers of the aesthetics of weightiness?

In this rich examination of the work of Marcel Breuer, Barry Bergdoll explores the marked shifts between his early European and later American work, and finds a constant in the pursuit of lightness. In his efforts to reconcile vernacular traditions with modern expression and the conditions of contemporary life, Bergdoll argues, Breuer created buildings that "held heavy and light in remarkable equipoise."

Renzo Piano about the "idea of openness as an antidote to terrorism"

2017-05-30T13:46:00-04:00

For Renzo Piano, every building should tell a story. The 79-year-old architect is as busy as ever with a workload that spans from Los Angeles to Uganda. With no signs of fatigue in a nearly 50-year career, Piano doesn’t struggle to find meaning in each new project. “I’ve wanted to make buildings since I was a kid,” says the Italian-born architect, who fondly recalls spending time at construction sites with his dad.

CityLab recently sat down with Piano for a conversation that, among other topics, touched on urban peripheries, Columbia University’s new Manhattanville Campus, and "the importance of designing buildings that reject paranoia in a world increasingly concerned with terrorism."

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:

EXCLUSIVE PHOTOS: Take a Tour Inside the Brand New Whitney Museum!

2015-04-23T18:38:00-04:00

May 1st will mark a new era for the Whitney when its brand new home along the High Line swings its doors open to the public for the first time. A project that has been decades in the making, the $422 million structure designed by Renzo Piano is a game changer for a museum that had long outgrown its Upper East Side space.

Archinect Sessions Episode #26: Modernism - Peru's Common Denominator; A Conversation with Lima Architect Sebastián Bravo

2015-04-23T15:39:00-04:00

This week on the podcast, Paul shares an interview he did in Lima with Sebastián Bravo, a local architect and maker of award-winning pisco. Studying and practicing architecture in a city with a very fresh history of terrorism and ongoing political corruption is no easy feat, and the rapidly urbanized/urbanizing city makes practicing all the more challenging, but Bravo is up to the challenge.

We also briefly discuss a recent workshop Paul attended with the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, which took a close look at why enrollment rates at architecture schools are falling, and the stereotypical misunderstandings of what skills high schoolers need to study architecture. In the news, we consider what it means for George Lucas to be building affordable housing in Marin County, whether metal really can move by itself, and briefly look to the deluge of Whitney Museum reviews.

Listen to episode twenty-six of Archinect Sessions, "Modernism - Peru's Common Denominator":

iTunes:...

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...