Uptown Downtown Runaround: Renzo Piano and New York’s Whitney Museum

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.