Quote:
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Originally Posted by shadowbat
That old OMA rendering looks like a scorpian ready to attack.
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Maybe they'll go back to something like that at the new location...(Newsweek)
Uptown Downtown Runaround
Renzo Piano was hired to design an addition to New York’s Whitney Museum—but scratch that, now he’s drawing up plans for a satellite museum downtown. Either way, he’s happy.
Renzo Piano in the atrium of New York’s Morgan Library & Museum, which he recently redesigned.
By Cathleen McGuigan
Newsweek
Nov. 2, 2006 - While museums around the country have been opening glamorous additions by star architects, the Whitney Museum of American Art can’t seem to get its act together. In 1985, the museum shelved a high-profile scheme by Michael Graves (the guy most famous today for creating products for Target) to expand its Marcel Breuer-designed museum on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Then in 2003, the trustees cancelled plans for a much-ballyhooed addition by the avant-garde Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas (his design was so over the top it was never actually unveiled). So it was a little shocking when word leaked out that the museum may well back out of a third plan for an addition—this one by the brilliant Italian Renzo Piano, whose scheme called for a quietly elegant nine-story tower to join the brooding granite Breuer building via glass bridges.
The Whitney had spent more than a year defending the Piano design against neighborhood opposition and finally won zoning approval from the city last summer—though some of the museum’s neighbors then filed a lawsuit to try to block the project.
A Whitney spokeswoman confirms the museum is now looking into constructing a satellite building in Manhattan’s ultracool downtown meatpacking district rather than expanding on its current tight site, though a final decision hasn’t been taken by the board of trustees. And here’s the good news: this time the Whitney isn’t dumping their architect but inviting him to create the design for a new site.
NEWSWEEK’s architecture critic Cathleen McGuigan spoke with Piano about what it’s like to go back to the drawing board.
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NEWSWEEK: How did you find out the Whitney may not build your current design after all the approvals were won?
Renzo Piano: A short time ago, in September, I was asked, how do you feel about moving, going somewhere else? So then
I went to the possible new site—and this is a beautiful piece of land, down by the meat market, a big open space—between the High Line [an abandoned elevated rail track that is being converted into a parklike esplanade] and the Hudson River. It’s big enough to make something very different, very generous. I like that place, including the meat smell! It’s full of energy. Of course, my first reaction was sad, when you spend a couple years struggling, and dreaming, about a scheme, and finally you may end by not doing it.
But you were immediately asked to design a new building?
Yes, yes, that was absolutely clear. Everybody, actually, asked me. I found that very nice, the fact they said that part of the possibility of this depends on your availability to be the architect.
What’s the reasoning behind considering another site? Is it about escalating costs to build on that difficult site uptown?
The truth is that,
a couple months ago, somebody started to wonder about staying there because, fundamentally we got the permission, but now a group is making legal action again. The atmosphere is so basically hostile, it is like growing flowers in bad earth. It’s incredible. Everybody started to wonder about this atmosphere.