![[from website] The Whitney Museum of American Art owes its striking granite presence at the southeast corner of Madison Avenue and 75th Street to the Hungarian-born, Bauhaus-trained architect Marcel Breuer (1902–1981). To design a third home for the…](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/51cc3eafe4b06b9ce7a67c59/1395600274061-W3P3YC4W4H3GOPJP08MY/photo+2.JPG)
Despite the aggressive, self-asserting look of the exterior, the interior was pretty quiet and very spiritual. The play of light is astonishing in the inside. (It is very surprising that the church accepted such radical form for their building, which makes me wonder how the architects sold their ideas to the client.) The building is all wrapped with corten steal, the fence is also corten steel. It did not feel as oppressing as I imagined, however, the unifying material certainly makes the building feel as a single object (especially as it is isolating itself with the fence around it and not very connected with the neighborhood) The corten steel panels are welded at points (not continuous)
[from website] The Whitney Museum of American Art owes its striking granite presence at the southeast corner of Madison Avenue and 75th Street to the Hungarian-born, Bauhaus-trained architect Marcel Breuer (1902–1981). To design a third home for the Museum—which had gradually migrated northward from its original location on West Eighth Street to West 54th Street—Breuer worked with Hamilton Smith, creating a strong modernist statement in a neighborhood of traditional limestone, brownstone, and brick row houses and postwar apartment buildings. Considered somber, heavy, and even brutal at the time of its completion in 1966 (“an inverted Babylonian ziggurat,” according to one critic), Breuer’s building is now recognized as daring, strong, and innovative. It has come to be regarded as one of New York City’s most notable buildings and identified with the Whitney’s approach to art.
