At the Met Breuer by Hal Foster
DeTnk Reccomended Reading
Hal Foster dissects the recently inaugurated Met Breuer in his article At The Met Breuer published in Vol. 38 No. 7 of the London Review of Books on the 31st March 2016.
At the Met Breuer by Hal Foster
When a beloved building goes dark, a hole opens in the urban fabric: so it was when the Whitney Museum left its old home on New York’s Upper East Side, constructed by Marcel Breuer in blunt granite and concrete in 1966. Its new headquarters, designed by Renzo Piano in elegant steel and glass, opened in Chelsea last May. For many months a cultural beacon in uptown Manhattan was dimmed, and the architectural dialogue between the inverted grey ziggurat of the Whitney on Madison Avenue and the expansive white spiral of the Guggenheim on Central Park, another masterpiece of late modernist building-as-sculpture created by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1959, was suspended. But now the Metropolitan Museum has taken over the old Whitney for exhibitions of modern and contemporary art, and, at least for the time being, the building, renamed the Breuer, looks much as its architect conceived it. Its bright lobby is cleared of commercial clutter, its signature bluestone floors, gridded concrete ceilings and great hooded windows are cleaned up, and its moat patio under the gangway entrance is planted with alders. With this restoration (done by Beyer Blinder Belle for $15 million), the Breuer becomes the prime artwork in the modern holdings of the Met. Yet the building is only on lease from the Whitney for eight years, and neither party will say what will happen afterwards.
