After 25 years of false starts, the board of the Whitney Museum of American Art has taken a step that will redefine the 80-year-old institution. It voted on Tuesday afternoon to begin construction on a building in the meatpacking district in Manhattan, to be completed by 2015, that will vastly increase the size and scope of the museum.

- NYT
The sale will effectively end any chance of the Whitney expanding in its current space, where it has been since 1966 and which it has been trying to enlarge since the architect Michael Graves unveiled the first of many expansion plans in 1985.

Without room to grow uptown, and without the income necessary to run two museums, the Whitney now faces the question of what to do with the Breuer building — which may end up being shared, at least temporarily, by another institution, perhaps the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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After Mr. Graves’s uptown addition fell through, there were other designs, by Rem Koolhaas and Renzo Piano. But each time the effort was abandoned because of the cost or the design or both.

The downtown Whitney, also by Mr. Piano, will be a six-story, 195,000-square-foot metal-clad building, with a dramatic cantilevered entrance. It will include more than 50,000 square feet of indoor galleries and 13,000 square feet of rooftop exhibition space, as well as classrooms, a research library, art conservation labs and a multi-use indoor/outdoor space for film, video and performance art. It will also include a restaurant, cafe and bookstore.