a propos du projet du NOUVEAU Whitney ....

The Whitney Museum of American Art is developing plans

to build a 195,000-square-foot building in downtown

Manhattan. Located in the Meatpacking Districton

Gansevoort Street between West Street and the High Line,

the new building, designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architect

Renzo Piano, will provide the Whitney with essential new space

for its collection, exhibitions, and education and performing

arts programs in one of New York’s most vibrant neighborhoods.

The downtown building will include more than 50,000 square feet

of indoor galleries and 13,000 square feet of rooftop exhibition space,

providing long-awaited opportunities to show more of the Whitney’s

unsurpassed collection of 20th- and 21st-century American art in

tandem with cutting-edge temporary exhibitions. (The galleries in

the Whitney’s Madison Avenue building, designed by Marcel Breuer

, total 32,000 square feet. The collection has grown from about 2,000

works at the time of the building’s opening, in 1966, to more than

18,000 works.)

The expansive third-floor special exhibition gallery will be

approximately 18,000 square feet, making it the largest column-free

museum gallery in New York City. Gallery space for ground-floor

exhibitions (accessible free of charge), the permanent collection

on the fourth and fifth floors, and for long-term projects on the

top floor, will total approximately 32,000 square feet.

Approximately 13,000 square feet of outdoor galleries

situated on four levels of the building’s rooftops will offer

dynamic exterior exhibition spaces. A dramatically cantilevered

entrance along Gansevoort Street will shelter a public plaza

for art that is destined to become a popular gathering space,

created only steps away from the southern entrance to the High Line

. The new building will engage the Whitney directly with the bustling

community of artists, gallerists, students, educators, entrepreneurs,

and residents in the Meatpacking District, Chelsea, and Greenwich

Village, where the Museum was founded by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney

in 1930.

The building also will offer dedicated space for state-of-the-art

classrooms and a seminar room; a research library; a large

art-conservation area; a multi-use indoor/outdoor space for film,

video and the performing arts; a 170-seat theater; and a study center (the classrooms, theater, and study center being firsts for the Whitney).

Other amenities include a restaurant, a café, and a bookstore,

which will contribute to the vibrant street life of the area.

Mr. Piano’s design takes a strong and strikingly asymmetrical form

—one that responds to the industrial character of the neighboring

loft buildings and overhead railway while asserting a contemporary,

sculptural presence. The upper stories of the building will stretch

toward the Hudson River on the west side and step back gracefully

from the elevated park of the High Line on the east side.

Ground breaking on the project is expected to happen in May 2011.

The building is projected to open to the public in 2015.

Project Team

Owner’s Rep: Gardiner & Theobald, Inc.; Design Architect: Renzo Piano

Building Workshop; Executive Architect: Cooper, Robertson & Partners;

MEP & Lighting Engineer: Ove Arup & Partners; Structural Engineer:

Robert Silman Associates; Construction Manager:

Turner Construction, LLC

ABOUT RENZO PIANO

Renzo Piano was born in Genoa, Italy, in 1937, into a family of builders.

In his home city he has strong roots, sentimental and cultural, with its

historic center, the port, the sea, and with his father’s trade. During his

time at university, the Milan Polytechnic, he worked in the studio of

Franco Albini. He graduated in 1964 and then began to work with

experimental lightweight structures and basic shelters. Between

1965 and 1970 he traveled extensively in America and Britain.

In 1971, he founded the studio Piano & Rogers with Richard Rogers

, and together they won the competition for the Centre Pompidou in Paris

, the city where he now lives. From the early 70s until the 90s,

he collaborated with the engineer Peter Rice, forming Atelier Piano & Rice

between 1977 and 1981. Finally, in 1981, he established Renzo Piano Building Workshop, with a hundred people working in Paris, Genoa, and New York.