Whitney’s Expansion Plans Are Shifting South, to the Meatpacking District

A month after the Dia Art Foundation
scrapped its plans to open a museum at the entrance to the High Line,
the abandoned elevated railway line that the city is transforming into
a public park, the Whitney Museum of American Art has signed on to take its place and build a satellite institution of its own downtown.

The Whitney recently reached a conditional agreement on Wednesday night
with the city’s Economic Development Corporation to buy the city-owned
site, at Gansevoort and Washington streets, officials at the museum
said yesterday. Plans call for the new museum to be at least twice the
size of the Whitney’s home on Madison Avenue at 75th Street, they said,
and to be finished within the next five years.

The deal, which has still to go through a public review process before
it is final, puts an end to the Whitney’s plan to for a nine-story
addition by the architect Renzo Piano
that would connect to the museum’s original 1966 Marcel Breuer building
via a series of glass bridges. It will be the third time in 11 years
that the museum has commissioned a celebrity architect to design a
major expansion to its landmark building, only to pull out.