Whitney Scraps Expansion Plans - by Rem Koolhaas

[Kris]

April 15, 2003
Whitney Scraps Expansion Plans
By CAROL VOGEL

The Whitney Museum of American Art announced yesterday that it has scrapped its plans to build an ambitious expansion designed by the Rotterdam-based architect Rem Koolhaas, a signal that there may be further belt-tightening for the institution.

"We're feeling the pinch," said Maxwell L. Anderson, the Whitney's director. "A project like this would be a big challenge, and we're not in a position to proceed with it."

Instead, Mr. Anderson added, the museum is going to concentrate on building its endowment, which stands at about $45 million.

Mr. Koolhaas, the fashionable architect known for his lime-green Prada stores, was hired by the Whitney two years ago. Since then he has presented the board with two different designs, both of which would have dramatically changed how visitors flow through the museum and significantly increased its space for exhibitions and public programming. While officials at the museum would not say how much either scheme would have cost, museum experts familiar with the project said the final and more modest plan came with a $200 million budget.

The first and more ambitious scheme was a three-part design. The museum's existing building on Madison Avenue and 75th Street, a granite cantilevered fortress designed by Marcel Breuer in 1966, would have basically been left alone. Four adjacent brownstones that the museum already owns and that are now used as commercial space would have been transformed into galleries. An 11-story building by Mr. Koolhaas would have risen behind them.

A second, more modified scheme called for joining the Breuer building with a new nine-story building where the Madison Avenue brownstones stand now. The two buildings would have been separated by a roof terrace.

This is not the first time the Whitney has abandoned expansion plans. In 1985, in the face of an uproar from neighbors, architects and civic groups, the museum gave up plans to build a $37.5 million 134,000-square-foot addition that was to have been designed by the Princeton architect Michael Graves. Mr. Graves's postmodern design would have radically altered the facade of the Breuer building.

Since then, the Whitney has proceeded gingerly. Five years ago it expanded from within, providing 30 percent more exhibition space by moving its library, archives and offices from the fifth floor of the Breuer building to an adjoining brownstone at 31-33 East 74th Street.

But the museum still lacks proper space for its permanent collection of about 13,000 works and for special exhibitions. It also does not have proper room for public programs. So in February 2001 the board hired Mr. Koolhaas, a decision that was well received because of his reputation for relating designs to contemporary culture and the urban environment.

He is currently working on the cultural district being developed in Brooklyn by Harvey Lichtenstein, the chairman of the Brooklyn Academy of Music Local Development Corporation.

But Mr. Koolhaas's luck with museums has not been very good lately. In November the Los Angeles County Museum of Art halted a project that he was to build there. And the Guggenheim Las Vegas, a soaring exhibition hall he designed for the Venetian Resort-Hotel-Casino, has been closed indefinitely less than two years after it opened.


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Derek2k3]

I hope it's just postponed.

Koolhaas's Whitney Makeover? Concrete and Curvy
The Whitney Museum is trying hard to keep its Rem Koolhaas–designed expansion under wraps, but one of our tipsters got a peek at a recent proposal. A massive crescent-shaped concrete structure would be built between the angular Marcel Breuer–designed museum and a neighboring brownstone. "It twists to the south before twisting to the north to hover over the existing Whitney," our source reports. The new structure would soar 200 feet above street level, more than doubling the height of the museum and increasing the amount of usable space to 700,000 square feet. Museum director Maxwell Anderson has maintained that the existing museum -- built in 1966 -- can't properly exhibit its collection or accommodate its 700,000 annual visitors, and has said the Whitney's expansion should break ground within the next six years; Koolhaas has been working on the project for more than a year. "All the trustees are thrilled with the design," the tipster says. "But they're aware that it might be difficult to get it approved by the city." A rep for the museum confirms our source's description but warns, "It's just one of the alternatives we're looking at. We won't be making a definitive comment until fall."

[Kris]

Koolhaas, a design darling, downsizes *
Fred A. Bernstein The New York Times
Saturday, April 26, 2003 *

NEW YORK Manhattan has consistently inspired in its beholders ecstasy about architecture," Rem Koolhaas, the Rotterdam-based architect, wrote in his 1978 book "Delirious New York." Koolhaas hoped to ratchet up the ecstasy with an addition to the Whitney Museum's Madison Avenue building and a hotel for Ian Schrager. But both projects have fizzled, and now the love affair between Koolhaas and the city appears to be on the rocks.

Last week, after the Whitney Museum of American Art canceled plans for the addition, which experts said would have cost at least $200 million, Koolhaas grumbled in a telephone interview that the Whitney's benefactors were more interested in building the endowment than his architecture.

Economic problems combined with bad timing and perhaps a bit of hubris have brought the cancellation of several long-awaited projects by Koolhaas, who won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2000.

In December, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced that it was indefinitely postponing a new Koolhaas complex because it could not raise enough of the $300 million cost. Also on the ropes is a 12-story Prada store in San Francisco, which would have been the most ambitious of three "epicenters" commissioned by Miuccia Prada. (The SoHo store in Manhattan opened in 2001, and one in Beverly Hills is under construction.)

While Daniel Libeskind, who won the World Trade Center commission, is busy opening an office in New York, Koolhaas, who says he opted not to participate in the final competition for the World Trade Center site, is reducing his New York office to a dozen employees. "Though the firm is in good shape globally," said a partner, Dan Wood, "its focus has moved away from the U.S." Wood added that he would be leaving the firm, amicably, because of the lack of American projects.

Koolhaas is one of many architects who have seen large commissions evaporate or shrink with the economic downturn. "There are layoffs at nearly every firm, small, large, famous, not famous," said Reed Kroloff, the former editor of Architecture Magazine, and a consultant to architecture competitions.

Frank Gehry, who like Koolhaas is a Pritzker Prize winner and whose Guggenheim museum planned for Lower Manhattan was canceled, said that potential clients "have pulled in their horns a little bit."

"There aren't as many inquiries," Gehry said. "The mood is different."

Richard Meier, also a Pritzker winner, said, "The phone may not be ringing as often."

In New York, budget cuts by the city have forced the cancellation of an addition to the Mid-Manhattan Branch of the New York Public Library at 40th Street designed by Gwathmey Siegel Associates. Libeskind's planned $55 million Jewish Museum San Francisco has been scaled back for budgetary reasons.

A tough economy may be forcing a more conservative turn in architecture, and Koolhaas is no traditionalist. His firm, he said in an interview, "is better at reinventing than reasserting." By that he means he is turning his attention to building a $650 million television broadcast center in Beijing, opening for the 2008 Olympics. The World Trade Center competition, he said in a speech in February at Columbia University, was all about looking backward, while the Chinese government was looking forward.

Robert Ivy, editor in chief of Architectural Record, said: "In China, people are basically saying, you can wave your hand and make this happen. You can understand Rem's enthusiasm for that kind of client." But, he added, "It's not surprising he might have sour grapes, given how many projects have evaporated."

Koolhaas's office has three projects under construction in the United States: the Prada store on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills; a student center at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and the Seattle Public Library. As recently as December, Koolhaas was optimistic enough to predict that the Whitney project would move forward and that the cancellation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art "would galvanize" donors to come through with the funds needed for his plan.

Neither has happened. That may be due in part to the ambition of Koolhaas's work. "People come to Rem for dramatic solutions to their problems," Kroloff said. "And those solutions tend to be terribly expensive." Koolhaas, 58, famously began his career not by building but by writing. His first book, "Delirious New York," was an account of how New York came to represent the "culture of congestion." His 2000 manifesto, the Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, featured his dazzling essay on the mall-style developments that he calls "junkspace."

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art would have been his biggest American project. Rather than preserve the museum's existing buildings, Koolhaas and his Office for Metropolitan Architecture proposed creating a new gallery complex under a vast curving roof. Koolhaas said his plan was nothing less than "a moral imperative" for the museum.

Morality and money are rarely drawn on the same account. The plan, according to the museum's president, Andrea Rich, meant that the museum had to build "all or nothing." Another kind of design, she said, might have been buildable in stages, allowing her to break ground before she had raised the entire cost.

Koolhaas's dazzling combination of materials and sometimes unsettling shapes may be visible at his art museum in Rotterdam or the concert hall nearing completion in Porto, Portugal, built from the ground up. (His Guggenheim Las Vegas, closed in January after less than two years of operation.) But in New York, his projects, the Prada store, the Lehmann Maupin Gallery in Chelsea and the Second Stage Theater in Midtown, have been interior renovations.

Time has not been kind to the Prada store, which opened in December 2001. "We've had some maintenance problems," said Wood, citing zebrawood floors that had to be refinished, aluminum polish that damaged marble and electronic systems that failed after tourists pushed the buttons "a few hundred times more than we expected." The store, he noted, "gets an extraordinary amount of traffic."

Koolhaas, for his part, says he is "committed to New York," adding: "It is an extremely critical part of my mental map." And Kroloff said that as bad as Koolhaas's situation in the United States is, "most architects would trade places with him in a second."


Copyright © 2003 The International Herald Tribune

[Kris]

May 13, 2003

Director of the Whitney Resigns

By CAROL VOGEL

Maxwell L. Anderson, director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, resigned Monday after a tumultuous five years in the post, the museum announced.

Rumors of trouble between Mr. Anderson and the Whitney's board had been circulating around the gossipy art world for some time. Mr. Anderson said in a statement that it had "become clear in recent months that the board and I have a different sense of the Whitney's future, in both the scale of its ambitions and the balance of its programming."

Leonard A. Lauder, the museum's chairman, agreed. "Max is a brilliant man of many talents," Mr. Lauder said in an interview. "It is unfortunate that there wasn't a perfect match of his skills and ambitions and that of the Whitney's."

Mr. Anderson, speaking by phone, said he was particularly disappointed when the board abandoned its plans to build a $200 million expansion designed by the Rotterdam-based architect Rem Koolhaas. When the project was officially scrapped last month, museum officials said they were concerned that the building would have been too expensive to operate let alone build in the current economic climate.

"We are trustees of a nonprofit organization," Mr. Lauder said. "We had to be prudent."

But Mr. Anderson called the issue of the building's expense debatable.

"In October 2001 the board was thrilled with the plan," he said, but over the months there were "incremental nagging doubts."

The board and Mr. Anderson also clashed over programming. Some people at the museum said board members had complained that Mr. Anderson did not go far enough in offering a balanced mix of more accessible shows and scholarly ones.

"Over the last five years I tried to embrace the Whitney's mandate to exhibit art with few compromises," Mr. Anderson said. "When it came down to it," he added, "with 42 trustees it was impossible to please everybody, and it had become increasingly more difficult to be in the vanguard." Museum officials, however, complained that Mr. Anderson had not generated enough original exhibitions.

When he first arrived at the museum, Mr. Anderson reorganized the staff, assigning specific curators to specialized areas. In the process several top curators resigned. For the first biennial under his directorship, which took place in 2000, rather than using the museum's staff to organize the show as it had always done in the past, he hired a team of outside curators, representing different regions of the country. The museum's biennials — primarily a showcase for new artists — are always exhibitions that the art world loves to hate, but this one was met with particularly tepid reviews.

During his tenure Mr. Anderson built the museum's collections by establishing acquisition committees in previously unsupported areas like film and video, architecture, and new media. He also founded the museum's first conservation department, directed the compilation of the first handbook to the permanent collection and increased the public's access to the collection both through exhibitions at the museum and through touring shows.

Before coming to the Whitney Mr. Anderson, 47, had been the director of the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto for three years. A native New Yorker, he graduated from Dartmouth College and earned a Ph.D. in fine arts from Harvard University. For six years, until 1987, he worked in the department of Greek and Roman art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. From 1987 to 1995 he was director of the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University in Atlanta.

Mr. Anderson's departure leaves the museum only further short-staffed. In March, Willard Holmes, its deputy director for nine years, resigned to become director of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford. He has not been replaced yet.

Mr. Anderson said he would stay on in the director's post until the fall. The board plans to name a search committee to find his replacement.

After he leaves the Whitney, Mr. Anderson said, he will become a Leadership Fellow at the Chief Executive Leadership Institute at the Yale School of Management, where he will advise on issues affecting public organizations.

"That will give me time to think about my future," he said.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[NoyokA]

Whitney museum renews expansion plans, report says:

May 19, 2004, 6:32 PM EDT

NEW YORK -- The Whitney Museum of American Art has renewed discussions about an expansion after more than a year, interviewing new architects including Italian designer Renzo Piano.

"Our committee has met with a number of people, and we're still deliberating," Leonard A. Lauder, the Whitney's chairman and head of its building committee, told The New York Times for Wednesday editions.

Last year the museum withdrew its plans for a $200 million expansion designed by Rotterdam architect Rem Koolhaas, calling the project too expensive.

The Whitney's director, Adam D. Weinberg, said the museum is "terribly overcrowded."

"Something will happen sooner rather than later," he said.

The Manhattan museum's architecture committee has had discussions with Piano and other architects, but no formal agreement had been made, Weinberg said.

Whitney officials have said they need to expand the museum's home at Madison Avenue and 75th Street to provide a better showcase for a growing permanent collection and perhaps an auditorium for public events. The museum several years ago bought four nearby brownstones that would likely be demolished for the expansion.

Piano has designed the Pompidou Center in Paris, the Menil Collection in Houston and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. He is undertaking a $100 million renovation of the Morgan Library in New York and creating a new wing of the Art Institute of Chicago.

The Whitney, which was founded in 1931, is home to more than 13,000 works by more than 2,000 artists. Its 2004 Biennial, its best-known event, features contemporary works by 105 artists and groups and runs through May 30.

[NoyokA]

Previous architects commissioned for the Whitney’s expansion and in order include Norman Foster, Michael Graves, and Rem Koolhaas. As far as A-List architects go Piano is among the most cost efficient and most likely to transform design to reality.

[Kris]

May 19, 2004

Once Again, the Whitney Is Planning to Expand

By CAROL VOGEL

Little more than a year after the Whitney Museum of American Art scrapped its plans for a $200 million expansion designed by the Rotterdam architect Rem Koolhaas, its board has started the process all over again. A building committee has been interviewing other architects, including the Italian Renzo Piano, who is considered the favorite, people in architectural circles said.

Mr. Piano has had considerable experience designing museums, including the Pompidou Center in Paris, the Menil Collection in Houston and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. Among his current museum projects are a $100 million expansion and renovation of the Morgan Library. About half of the Morgan's new design is to be underground, minimizing its interference with the existing buildings. He is also designing a 220,000-square-foot-wing of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Mr. Piano's other projects include a new West Harlem campus for Columbia University and a 52-story tower to be built by The New York Times Company and Forest City Ratner Companies at Eighth Avenue and 40th Street.

"Our committee has met with a number of people, and we're still deliberating," said Leonard A. Lauder, the Whitney's chairman who heads its building committee.

Expansion of the museum presents particularly tricky design problems. Its current home at Madison Avenue and 75th Street, a cantilevered granite fortress designed by Marcel Breuer in 1966, is increasingly cramped, with little room to display its growing permanent collection. It has no auditorium or other appropriate space for public programs. The building has such a distinctive profile that it is difficult to add to. It is also in a landmark district that has its own restrictions on building.

Four adjacent brownstones on Madison, now used as commercial space, were bought years ago for the Whitney to grow into. Those buildings would probably be demolished to make way for the new design.

For decades unhappy neighbors as well as architects and civic groups have voiced opposition to a Whitney expansion. In 1985 such pressure forced the museum to abandon plans to build a $37.5 million 134,000-square-foot addition designed by the Princeton, N.J., architect Michael Graves. Mr. Graves's postmodern design would have radically altered the facade of the Breuer building.

Since then the Whitney has proceeded timidly. Six years ago it expanded from within, gaining 30 percent more exhibition space by moving its library, archives and offices from the fifth floor of the Breuer building to an adjoining brownstone at 31-33 East 74th Street. Mr. Koolhaas's project was scrapped because it was deemed too expensive to build and operate.

"We're terribly overcrowded," said Adam D. Weinberg, the new director of the Whitney, which will celebrate its 75th anniversary in 2006. "Something will happen sooner rather than later." He said the architecture committee had had discussions with Mr. Piano, as well as with other architects. "But no formal agreement has been made with anyone," he said.

Since coming to the museum on Nov. 1 from the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., where he was director, Mr. Weinberg has been restructuring its curatorial staff. Even before he arrived he said one of his first acts would be to abolish the curatorial system created by his predecessor, Maxwell L. Anderson, who resigned under fire a year ago. Under Mr. Anderson's direction, curators were each assigned to portfolios or specialized areas, organized chronologically. Now curators will have areas of expertise but will be expected to work in other areas, too.

Mr. Weinberg is putting his own team in place. He has just hired three new curators: Elisabeth Sussman, a former Whitney curator from 1991 to 1998; Donna De Salvo, who has organized shows at the Whitney and who has most recently been a senior curator at the Tate Modern in London; and Joan Simon, an independent curator in Paris. One slot still open, Mr. Weinberg said, is that of a drawing curator.

The appointments do not necessarily signal a major increase in the Whitney's staff. Marla Prather, curator of postwar art, was dismissed in January, and Lawrence R. Rinder, its curator of contemporary art, is leaving to become dean of graduate studies at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. (Mr. Rinder will continue as an an adjunct curator at the Whitney, working on the many exhibitions he has initiated, like the midcareer survey of the Los Angeles artist Tim Hawkinson, which is to open in February.)

Meanwhile Mr. Weinberg will act as the museum's chief curator. "I've been a curator for so many years, I want to keep my fingers in things," he said. "I want my imprint on collections and exhibitions, and not work through an intermediary."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

Byard's book illustrates all three major proposals in the late 1980's by architect Michael Graves to expand the Whitney Museum of American Art, whose original cantilevered building was designed by Marcel Breuer in 1966.

http://thecityreview.com/byard.html

[alejo]

thanks god it didn't happened.

[billyblancoNYC]

Originally Posted by Kris

Byard's book illustrates all three major proposals in the late 1980's by architect Michael Graves to expand the Whitney Museum of American Art, whose original cantilevered building was designed by Marcel Breuer in 1966.

http://thecityreview.com/byard.html

What the f is that???

Anyway, does it make more sense to expand, or to take up new or a seperate additional residence downtown, or on the West Side, or part of the East River plan, etc.? I know a lot of it is down the road, but what do you guys think?

[Kris]

Renzo Piano to Design Whitney Expansion

[brianac]

August 01. 2008 2:45PM

Whitney Museum selling nearby townhouses

After scrapping a controversial plan to expand its presence on the Upper East Side, the museum is putting some of its Madison Avenue townhouses up for sale.

Theresa Agovino

The Whitney Museum of American Art is seeking to sell five townhouses next to its Madison Avenue location that were slated to be part of a now-defunct, controversial plan to expand on the Upper East Side.

A Whitney spokesman said the museum is in the early stages of exploring a sale and will use the money to fund the new building it is planning in the meat-packing district.

Real estate sources said the museum tapped CB Richard Ellis Inc. to sell five townhouses on Madison Avenue between East 74th and East 75th streets in the hopes of raising $60 million. The Whitney spokesman wouldn’t confirm the dollar figure and said a sale would have to be approved by the institution's board.

The townhouses would be a challenging development site because they reside in an historic district. For instance, any demolition or work done on the exterior would need to be approved by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission.

The buildings are all empty now except for two retail tenants. The museum is on the corner of Madison Avenue and East 75th Street.

In 2006, the Whitney scrapped a plan to construct a tower behind the townhouses even though it had won the necessary approvals despite bitter opposition from some Upper East Side residents and preservationists. The townhouses were going to be incorporated in the expansion.

The Whitney spokesman said the museum decided to abandon the plan because a lot on Gansevoort and Washington streets became available and it believed that would be a better place to expand. That site is expected to open in late 2012 and was designed by architect Renzo Piano, who also designed the ill-fated Madison Avenue expansion.

http://www.crainsnewyork.com/apps/pb...FREE&nocache=1

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