SAVE THE WHITNEY
Save the Whitney
MICHAEL SORKIN
Village Voice, J UNE 25, 1985
History seems poised to take its revenge on poor Marcel Breuer. The late
architect, you may recall, was justly lambasted some years ago for designing
a scheme to place an office tower on the roof of Grand Central Station.
Opposition to that venture was the Agincourt of local preservationism,
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a victory after which the climate changed decisively. Now, the Whitney
Museum, in apparent tit for Breuer’s historic tat, proposes to expand itself
by building on top of his great gray granite original an architectural affront
of such magnitude that the only conceivable explanation is whimsical redress
of the dead man’s nearly forgotten gaffe. Poetic justice, however, will be
symmetrically served only if the current scheme meets the fate of the former.
The Breuer Whitney is a masterpiece. With Edward Durrell Stone’s
original Museum of Modem Art and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim
Museum, it completes a trinity of marvelous museums, a virtual recapitulation of the modern movement. All three of these institutions have lately felt
the need to expand and all have been imperiled. At MOMA, the damage is
already done: the original building has been reduced to its facade, its elevation
hanging like a modernist painting on a gallery wall. Plans for the Guggenheim
have not been revealed in detailed form. Perhaps the threatened intrusion will
be held at bay by the totemic power of Wright’s original, the master of hubris
hexing attempts at effacement from beyond the grave.
At the Whitney, there’s no doubt. The violence offered by Michael
Graves’s proposed expansion is almost unbelievable. Adding to a masterpiece
is always difficult, calling for discipline, sensitivity, restraint. Above all, though,
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it calls for respect. The Graves addition isn’t simply disrespectful, it’s hostile, an
assault on virtually everything that makes the Breuer original particular. It’s a
petulant, Oedipal piece of work, an attack on a modernist father by an upstart,
intolerant child, blind or callow perhaps, but murderous. Yet for this the blame
is not entirely the architect’s. Society asked him to do it. Graves, after all, is
a designer with an idiom and could scarcely be expected to throttle his own
voice at a moment of tremendous expansion in his career. Graves was simply
a wrong choice. The degree of the error is what startles—somebody with
influence must really have hated the Breuer building.
The strength of the Whitney’s architecture is not simply its singularity
but its refined embodiment of the modernist spirit. Breuer may be presently
out of vogue, but he’s indisputably one of the tops. A member of the core
cadre at the Bauhaus, Breuer wound up in the U.S. after the school was shut
down by the Nazis. Like the furniture for which he’s so universally renowned,
his architecture is shapely, strong, and frank. It shows the craftsperson’s love
of construction and materials, attentive always to an idea of integrity that
modernism elevated to an ethic. For Breuer, pouring concrete and bending
tubular steel were kindred, essential operations, the center of his art. His work
was always, in some primary way, about its own materiality, an address to the
solidification of concrete rather than the concretization of fashion.
The Whitney—like the Guggenheim—is an investigation of a boldly
sculptural form, part of an architecture conceived as mass—not, as with Graves,
as surface. Breuer’s take here extended well beyond the primary form of the
object to the specific gravity of its constituents. The Whitney is an essay in
architectural density, an extremely subtle and revelatory exploration of shades
of gray, of texture, weight, and variation in stone and concrete. Breuer was
scarcely alone in his fascination with this research. Le Corbusier’s post-war
production was formally centered on heroic sculpting in concrete. Likewise,
Paul Rudolph was—at the time Breuer did the Whitney—pouring out his own
fabulous concrete period. Indeed, a worldwide fascination with the stuff had
come to bear the soubriquet Brutalism, a somewhat unfortunate play on
the French for raw concrete, beton brut, a term reflecting the traditionally
worshipful Gallic mystification of the natural (eau sauvage).
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SAVE THE WHITNEY
The Whitney is miles from brutality, light years from those rough-cast
shrines to abrasion that gave Brutalism its bad name. This is a building about
sequence, conceived modernistically—according to a “free plan.” Virtually
every moment is spatially imagined and dramatic. First comes the building’s
startling presence on the street. Breuer recognized both the scale and the
jumble of that reach of Madison Avenue and made a building at once distinct
and deferential. The flip side of its ingenious in-stepping excavation of the
below-grade sculpture court and inflection (the current word) toward its
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entrance, is the out-stepping of the mass as it rises until its upper most part
presses against the street-wall, like Marcel Marceau limning a window. In a
time before cornice heights became a matter of legislation (the Whitney lies in
the present Madison Avenue Special Zoning District) Breuer made a building
whose top almost precisely accords with current wisdom as to where that line
should be.
Recognizing the party-wall character of the row, Breuer divided his
Madison Avenue elevation into three parts: a thin concrete wall butted up
against its neighbors; a narrow zigzagging band containing, among other
things, the great stair; and the main stepping mass, housing the galleries, to
which are affixed the winning “eyebrow” windows, apt symbols of museumgoing. This division into three has the additional effect (in concert with the
lovely bridge and the splatter of windows) of pulling one’s reading of the
building off the symmetrical, reinforcing the strength of its corner.
Breuer’s covered bridge makes one of New York’s finest entries. Its
angular form and cast concrete construction are reflected in the zigzag band
containing the stair, a nice unity between the building’s two primary icons of
movement. Bridging the sculpture-filled moat, one glimpses behind it the social
life of the cafe, a lovely introduction, and arrives in the slate-floored lobby
space, both day-lit and illuminated by a beautiful array of silvered bulbs in
saucer-shaped reflectors. From the lobby, one is offered three swell circulation
experiences, a happy dilemma of potential progression. The options are: to go
down a monumentalized open stair to the cafe and courtyard visible beyond; to
go up in the gigantic elevator, that wonderful ascending room; or to enter the
staircase.
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As the stairway is one of the great architectural problems, Breuer’s is
one of the great solutions. On each floor the sequence begins with an orienting curved wall that sets up the experience in terms of direction, materials, and
lighting. Then comes the stair itself, both complexly configured and perfectly,
restfully modulated. Let me recall some fragments. The initial overlook to
the street. The fine rail of metal and wood. The rhythm of compression and
expansion of the space. The stone treads cantilevering out from the concrete
armature, visible only from beneath. The investigation of adjacent values in
materials, rough, smooth, dense, and less. The mysterious diffusion of light.
The benches like altars. A helluva place.
Finally the galleries. Their high rooms use strong textures of floor
and filing as datums against which to register shifts in wall. The periodic
surprise of the variously sized eccentric windows offers counterpoint to overall
orthogonality. This is the building of a designer working at the height of his
powers, a complete work of art, not alterable. Too young to be an official
landmark, it’s one in every other sense, an historic structure.
The Graves scheme leaves no aspect of the Whitney unvandalized. The
overall strategy is to obliterate the building by rendering it subsidiary, turning
it into no more than a subordinate part of a larger whole. At the level of
massing, this is accomplished by adding a volume of similar size and height at
the other end of the block, where it acts—along with the supressed original—
like one of the bottom members of a human pyramid. On the backs of these
two structures, Graves loads level after klutzy level of building, now a tier with
little setbacks, now a tier with a cyclopean lunette, now a gross pergola, now
a rustic cornice. It’s a strategy meant to dazzle us out of so much as noticing
the buried Breuer, a relentless assault of mass, materials, shapes, and phony
style. Between the two bottom volumes is perhaps Graves’s most inane and
subversive invention, a stepped cylinder which has assumed one of those fauxnaif monikers so beloved of architects: the hinge.
The hinge is pivotal. It centralizes the composition, erasing both the
Breuer’s own asymmetry and its asymmetrical relationship to the rest of the
block. It further rationalizes the spurious balance between the original and
its hulking doppelganger by picking up the Breuer’s coursing and set-in lines
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SAVE THE WHITNEY
and conveying them to its apish kith. To do this, it literally obliterates the two
narrow vertical bands mentioned earlier and attaches itself to what remains,
causing both sides of the composition to step down symmetrically from the
middle of the block, a complete transformation of Breuer’s intent. Affixed to
the old Whitney like a goiter, the device obscures and intrudes on the stair and
irrevocably blemishes the front facade.
In plan, the hinge provides the opportunity for a circular form which
Graves uses to achieve several juvenile rotations off the grid and to create a
lumber of cylindrical spaces. Breuer’s original free plan has been overwhelmed
by axial relations, banal symmetries, and facile scale tricks. The eyebrow
windows no longer float in space, they’re at the ends of corridors or trapped in
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little rooms like pigs in pokes. There are major axes and minor axes, chambers
and antechambers, portals and vestibules, the whole shitty beaux-arts
apparatus against which modernism rebelled. No doubt there will be the usual
fey pastels and precious neo-conservative details as well. Absolutely nothing
is left untouched. The curved stair-entries will go, as will the window. The big
elevator will no longer serve. The cafe will be yanked up to the roof. Graves
even proposes to dump steps into the sculpture court. The man’s a kamikaze.
Whatever else he is, though, Michael Graves is surely a creature of the
current climate, an architect for the age of Reagan. I imperfectly understand
the institutional imperatives that make the Whitney want to tart itself up in the
moth-eaten retro drag of Capitalist Realism, to make a museum that looks like
a museum, but here’s the proof that it does. The question now is how can it be
stopped, how can a magnificent building be saved?
I think this scheme may be vulnerable. Not because it’s unbearably,
stupidly ugly (no crime here and besides, [Paul] Goldberger thinks it’s a work
of genius), but because it’s bad of its kind and because it so clearly affronts
everything that we hold dear, preservationwise. Looking at the drawings, it
struck me that Graves’s heart wasn’t really in this: the plans and elevations were
so dull, so filled with hackneyed figures and arrangements, the whole thing so
autoplagiaristic, no better than a bad rip-off, looking like it was done in two
weeks. Properly apprised of this, perhaps the Whitney will demur, call for a
redo, not want to add a third-rate piece to its collection.
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More promising may be the preservation route. While the Breuer
enjoys only weak protection, the adjoining brownstones cannot be destroyed
without permission from the Landmarks Commission. Their demolition is
defended by Graves on the grounds that the new building will “enhance the
urban characteristics of the surrounding neighborhood.” This, of course, is the
old “we had to destroy it to save it” argument, of a class with the idea that we
might as well tear down Paris since we’ve got a perfectly good facsimile down
at Disney World.
Graves himself identifies the key physical characteristics of the nabe
as being small-scale and “figurative.” This may or may not be true, but I can’t
see how this analysis jibes with banging in the equivalent of 20 stories and
wiping out a fine group of traditionally figured remnants. I’m no knee-jerk
preservationist, but if the only way to get this awful addition subtracted is to
save those brownstones, let’s save the hell out of them. Hands off the Whitney,
Graves!
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