Save the Whitney

Michael Sorkin
Village Voice, June 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, 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, 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.

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 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. 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 faux naif
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 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 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, preservation-wise.
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 auto-
plagiaristic, 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.

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!