LOST IN SPACE

The Whitney Museum reopened two months ago in new expanded digs in the Meatpacking District, a colossus designed by Renzo Piano on Gansevoort Street that spans Tenth and Ninth Avenues. It has huge column-free galleries on its fifth through eighth floors, picture windows on its west facade with views to the Hudson River, staggered balconies on its east facade with views to the Highline, and an open glass-walled lobby that doubles as a public plaza.

It’s hard, from outside, to get a clear sense of the building. From Fourteenth Street its decks and railings gives it it the feeling of an approaching luxury liner. From Tenth Avenue it looks like a postmodern playhouse, a precarious stack of seven smaller volumes finished in different materials. The Gansevoort Street facade, where one enters, is dominated by the sloping hull of the gallery spaces that’s cantilevered above. This immense, inert mass is wrapped in blank green-grey metal panels that give no scale or sense of the interior.

And it’s hard, from inside, to get a clear sense of the building. The visitors’ pamphlet shows a building cross section rather than floor plans, suggesting that, like the old Whitney, it’s a vertical museum, experienced floor-by-floor. But there’s no hierarchy or variety in the gallery floors – they’re all the same. And there’s no element tying them together, like the iconic concrete stair in the old building. The ceremonial stair at the new building reaches from the ground floor to the fifth and then, abruptly, stops.

The new Whitney is a super-large building that feels as if it’s been conceived in small moments, without any central organizing principle. Many of its details are exuberant and exquisite: the staggered patio decks and runs of railings, the high glass curtain wall at the sidewalk cafe, the attenuated steel posts that support the cantilevered gallery floors, the punched ship windows at third floor study rooms. But the building has no heart. One walks through it searching for the vantage point from which all its operations make sense, and just can’t find it.

Photograph by Ed Lederman, courtesy of the Whitney Museum.

July 05, 2015 by Nalina Moses

ROOF PARTY

When I visited the newly-renovated Harvard Art Museums (HAM), a woman stepping out of one of the galleries stopped and groaned, to no one in particular, “Wait, where am I? I can’t tell where I’ve already been and where I’m going." That’s because the new building isn’t concerned with shaping a coherent museum experience, or with housing artworks, but with the heroics of its own architecture.

The renovation, by Renzo Piano Building Workshop, combines three smaller, older university art museums: the Fogg, the Bush-Reisinger, and the Sackler. Those structures sat quietly in the maze of one-way colonial-era streets around campus. The new building takes the gracious, colonnaded, three-story Romanesque courtyard of the Fogg, about the size of a basketball court, as its entry. It’s this space that visitors step into from the street, where they queue for tickets, and where they linger at cafe tables before leaving. A new floor of small galleries rings the atrium above, and, above that, two new floors of offices and classrooms. The heightened atrium is capped with a glass and steel pyramid that, in its grandeur, recalls I. M. Pei’s entrance pavilion to the Louvre.

Each of the small, square galleries is lit dimly, crammed with artworks, and offers only limited views to the streets outside. So one staggers from one back out into the atrium and then onto the next, never quite certain of where she’s headed. The glass roof is strangely charismatic, pulling attention up, away from the galleries. Thought it funnels sunlight into the atrium, most of the galleries remain in shadow.

It’s not the galleries, or even the atrium, but the glass pyramid that’s the heart of this building. It’s been finely and extravagantly detailed, with a web of white steel ribs, ties and struts supporting sloped glass panels, in a display of technical wizardry that’s become Piano’s signature. But when viewed from up close, on the balconies of the upper floors, the framing seems dense, much heavier that what’s required to support the glass. And when viewed from the atrium it obscures any view to the sky. The pyramid would be best observed from above, by a bird. It does little to serve the art, and art-lovers, below.

Photograph by Peter Vanderwarker, courtesy of Renzo Piano Building Workshop.

April 25, 2015 by Nalina Moses

The Renzo Piano show (Fragments) at the Gagosian gives us one table piled with things (books, drawings, sketches, photographs, prototypes, models) for each of twenty-four of the architect's projects. So there’s a table for the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre in New Caledonia, another for the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and another for the New York Times Building. More models and prototypes hang from the ceiling on wires, twitching like helium-filled balloons, while the walls of the gallery remain entirely empty. If the curators wanted to steer clear of a conventional installation, they’ve succeeded, but the tables don’t serve Piano’s work well, giving a confetti-like blast of information (fragments) for each building rather than a sense of what it is. It’s especially disconcerting because Piano has a gift for synthesizing various building components (image, skin, structure, mechanics) in a single form. Many of his buildings are skeletal; they take their origin in a frame (interior or exterior), and all their workings cling to it.

The best parts of the displays are the large-scale mockups and prototypes for individual building parts. Ceramic blocks (glazed in sun-drenched yellow, orange and green) from the Central Saint Giles office blocks in London have a high class kookiness. A wood cladding prototype for the new addition to the Fogg Museum, with boards nestled snugly over one another like a row of sleeping animals, promises that the project will be beautifully crafted. And an arm-long structural rib from a 1983 IBM Traveling Pavilion, a delicately cambered redwood arch with a worn aluminum Celtic-cross-shaped connector, has the presence of a relic. These and the other large-scale models get at the constructedness of Piano's buildings. While they’re pragmatic things – like machine parts – they’re supremely elegant, designed with care but little fuss. (Compare that to the parts of Santiago Calatrava’s building, which embody a lot of fuss.) We can find all sorts of things (drawings, photographs and narratives) about Piano’s buildings online. Why didn’t the curators just pack the gallery with those things we can’t?

Studio at Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Genoa. Photo by Fregoso & Basal. Courtesy of Renzo Piano Building Workshop.

August 13, 2013 by Nalina Moses

Renzo Piano has become our go-to architect for museums. He designed the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1977 with former partners Richard Rice and Richard Rogers and then, solo, the Menil Collection and additions to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the High Museum of Art. The Pompidou Center is a singular piece of work, but the others are tasteful, intelligent and unobtrusive structures that generally stay out of the way of the artwork. So nothing prepared me for the power of Piano’s addition to the Morgan Library, which opened in 2006 but I saw for the first time last week. I’ve passed its discrete, metal-clad entrance on Madison Avenue countless times and simply walked on by, so unprepossessing did it seem from the sidewalk.

But the interior is commanding, a place where pristine cartesian space rules. Piano’s addition, which serves as a lobby and cafe, connects three existing Morgan buildings, including the original Charles Mckim-designed museum from 1903. Piano imagined the new building as a perfect cube and there’s a a geometric rigor in its details and construction as well as its proportions. This modest glass box (it’s only about about eighteen feet high) gave me more pleasure than any other modern building I’ve visited in New York City. My favorite parts are the framelesss glass elevator cabs (they’re also cubes) that rise and fall musically, and seemingly effortlessly, on exposed pistons. American architects continually grumble that their clients prefer traditional styles and that their contractors can’t build finely. This building shows otherwise.

April 27, 2012 by Nalina Moses