Museums: Cliffhhanger on Madison Avenue

It is like no other building in New York. Huge, cantilevered stories jut outward rather than recede, as in most commercial buildings. The ground floor is cut off from the street by a sunken sculpture garden, already dubbed “the Moat,” spanned by a partially canopied bridge. As last week’s opening-night throng of 4,000 quickly discovered, such architectural novelty has certain distinct advantages. Arriving in the pelting rain, the guests had no sooner ducked under the stone canopy than they discovered that the bridge ahead of them (see opposite) was bone dry, sheltered by the towering, projecting museum wings overhead. While still outside, they were already protected and being beckoned within.

It was the first, but only one of the many surprises tucked behind the granite-sheathed fagade of Manhattan’s new Whitney Museum of American Art. Even in a time that has seen museum design change from the Roman palazzos favored by turn-of-the-century architects to the spiraling extravaganza of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim, and Mies van der Rohe’s austere glass cube for Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the $6,000,000 Whitney, designed by Marcel Breuer and Hamilton Smith, was the event and talk of the evening.

Jungle Identity. Not that the exhibition within—”Art of the United States: 1670-1966″—was overlooked. It hardly could be, for rarely, if ever, has a better survey of American art been assembled under one roof. But what won over the first nighters was Breuer’s dramatic exterior combined with spacious, almost handcrafted interiors, including white canvas and plywood walls, split bluestone floors, and precast concrete grid ceilings, that seemed to recede impassively behind the art works on display.

Thus the museum is two different experiences: monumental on the outside and functional, well-lighted and roomy on the inside. This is precisely what Architect Breuer had hoped for. “A museum in Manhattan,” he said, “should not look like a business or office building. Its form and material should have identity and weight in the dynamic jungle of our colorful city.”

Signature Window. Breuer’s problem began when he was handed a small corner plot only 104 ft. by 125 ft. To create within five stories a total floor space seven times as great as the site, he proceeded much like a Sardinian baker, who, with every piece of dough he subtracts, adds it back some place else in the loaf. Thus to compensate for space lost by the indoor-outdoor sculpture garden and the host of first-floor functional requirements, from coat racks and publications desk to unloading platforms, Breuer designed cantilevered upper floors to produce progressively larger galleries culminating in a lofty, sky-lit top gallery.

Realizing that a glass faÇade would only allow the polyglot architecture of Madison Avenue to intrude, Breuer walled off his neighbors with concrete blinders and nearly solid walls. Controlled ventilation and artificial light may make windows obsolete, but lack of them has the drawback of inducing claustrophobia. To allow “visual contact with the outside,” he added seven trapezoidal windows, including the largest on the front facade, which acts as both a signature and a beacon.

Original Dream. With its new building, the Whitney is also writing a new charter. Officially founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, a Manhattan blueblood who fled the debutante life to study with Rodin and became a sculptor in her own right, the family-dominated museum all but lost its identity when it moved next to the Museum of Modern Art in 1954. Even its decision to sell its distinguished collection of historical U.S. art in 1949 now seems to have been a miscalculation.

Today, with triple the space and a national committee headed by Jacqueline Kennedy, the Whitney intends to make up for lost opportunities. It will selectively restock its historical collection, expand its once-eminent print collection, exhibit traveling shows of American art that have been bypassing Manhattan for lack of space. But Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s original dream will not be forgotten. In cutting the ribbon, her daughter dedicated the new building “to the ideal that the Whitney has always stood for—the service of this country’s living art.” And to keep the museum’s view broadly national rather than parochial, the Ford Foundation gave the Whitney a handsome birthday present: $155,000 to pay for a five-year talent search among artists living outside New York.