Inverting a Ziggurat

...The new Whitney has neither the glamorous chic of the Museum of Modern Art, nor the baronial fustiness of a place like the Metropolitan Museum...

...It is not surprising, then, in visiting Marcel Breuer's new Whitney Museum of American Art, his first museum and his first building in Manhattan, that one should encounter the hushed solemnity of a cathedral...

...While most buildings are constructed to some measure of man and his routine activities, as well as to the mechanical equipment he has devised for his home, his schools, his places of business, the museum must address itself to a less measurable quantity: the individual response to works of art...

...One can only compare this-to make the distinction clear-with the effect at the Guggenheim where, like a modern Dante, one is propelled restlessly down the ramp, circling past the works of art to achieve rest in the lower depths...

...The fourth floor gallery, for example, with a ceiling height of more than 17 feet, should easily accommodate the ambitious works that American artists are now engaged in creating...

...Breuer has remarked that his museum was intended to be an "independent and self-relying unit, but one that would have a visual connection with the street...

...Not a random effect, incidentally, but one that was designed into the construction forms...

...The growing public response to art and the rising attendance figures at museums and galleries have created traffic jams that make the silent enjoyment of a painting or a piece of sculpture scarcely practicable...

...He is one of those architects (Louis Kahn is another) who have been recognized principally as teachers, and whose fame as one of the shapers of modern architecture has come late in their careers...

...These passageways maintain the human equation in the museum...

...From furniture, Breuer moved into interior design and eventually into architecture...

...This emphasis on transitional spaces-like the large, empty galleries waiting to be transformed into the occasion of a specific exhibition-is repeated again in the stairways between the gallery floors...

...they have designed a structure that incorporates some very advanced solutions to those problems of installation and display that are difficult for most museums and that have plagued the Guggenheim, for instance, since its opening...

...The Museum's opening exhibition, a huge survey of American art encompassing 300 years and 400 works of art, will be reviewed in a later report...

...True, contemporary museums have had to take account of definable problems that did not face the architects of earlier institutions...

...It remains to be seen whether the Whitney, which is still an individual unit, however splendidly conceived and functionally complex, will alter that judgment...

...The gray of these materials relates to the darker gray of the hand-split bluestone flooring used in most of the galleries...

...Unless, that is, you reverse the procedure and make the trip a penitential ascent of the mountain...

...Although the architect's method has been unobtrusive, it is nonetheless effective...

...John's Abbey church, as well- has been textured...

...the solution was to cantilever the second, third and fourth floor galleries out beyond the lobby area while keeping the pedestrian level open and spacious...

...If he is the designer of a museum for contemporary art, he is confronted with the unpredictable demands of the art itself-paintings that are no longer content to occupy a modest space on the wall, sculptures that are reaching environmental proportions, electronic monsters that require a separate wall plug and a little lebensraum...

...John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota (together with a school complex), for which ne was awarded the American Institute's Award of Merit in 1962...

...Reduced to the simplest terms, Breuer has conceived his museum as large, flexible, unobtrusive spaces for painting, sculpture and whatever hybrids the future may bring, together with beautifully realized accessways, doubling as sanctuaries, for the visitor...

...His career now spans four decades of international activity, including the design of residences, schools and factories, as well as the commission (along with Nervi and Zehrfuss) for the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris...

...Much of the building, in fact, has the appearance of having been handcrafted...

...Yet, beyond these considerations, the architect must provide for that personal communion that only comes into being between a work of art and its beholder...

...The Breuer chair, constructed of tubular steel, set the pattern for a good deal of modern furniture and is still a viable classic of contemporary design...

...In my own view, the new Whitney is an architectural statement of clarity, force and perceptive organization that far excels most recent additions to the New York City landscape...

...Early in his career, while at the Dessau Bauhaus, he was known chiefly as a designer of furniture...

...Breuer and his associate, Hamilton Smith, made extensive studies of the museum's operations in the initial planning stages...

...One enters the museum by crossing a bridge of reinforced concrete that spans a sunken outdoor sculpture garden and with its canopy forms a connective structure between the street and the sculptured block of the museum itself...

...either bushhammered by hand, giving it a ridged appearance, or left with the imprint of the forming boards...

...Everything enhances without intruding upon the experience of individual works of art...

...In this sense, the architectural requirements for a museum are rather like those of a church...

...In the past, Breuer has been criticized as an architect who is superb at detail and in the design of individual units, but whose large projects, like UNESCO, have lacked an overall coherence...

...They are nearly monastic settings, scaled to privacy and reflection...

...As a result of their judicious planning, the Whitney now has three times the exhibition and storage space it had in its old, cramped quarters on 54th Street...

...Even in the brief passage across the bridge (no doubt, due to the particular magic that bridges effect) one is made aware of the transition from one realm of experience into another...

...The gray granite which sheathes the building's exterior and is employed in some of the interior spaces, has been chemically treated, giving it a warm, matte surface, quite different from the chilly perfection of the polished stone...

...Even the stone steps in the stairways have subtly carved toe slots...

...On a comparatively small corner plot (104 by 125 feet) they hoped to conserve as much space as possible for gallery areas...

...The architect of a museum today must be something of a traffic commissioner, ordering broad thoroughfares through the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, pleasant detours through the Greek vases, dead ends for the collection of Egyptian artifacts...

...Nor is it any surprise to learn that one of Breuer's more recent and notable architectural projects was St...

...An urban museum, he claimed, "should transform the vitality of the street into the sincerity and profundity of art...

...I find it difficult to follow those critics who feel that the museum, a striking plastic entity in itself, will offer too much competition to the art it is intended to house...

...The architectural concrete-this was one of the structural features of the St...

...The architectural critic, Peter Blake, has dubbed Breuer "the last of the true functionalists.' The Whitney, as well as his career, confirms the judgment...

...It is not an intimate museum...

...One is given the opportunity to assimilate the pleasures left behind, anticipate the experiences of the gallery on the next level...

...There, it will be remembered, the Whitney was a poor relation on the art scene, cast into shadow by its cosmopolitan cousin, the Museum of Modern Art...

...The Whitney, which opened last month, takes its place as one of New York's most distinctive buildings...

...But aside from its elegant detailing, its straightforward articulation, its admirable functionalism, the building-as superb architecture is supposed to do-provides its own unique ambience...

...With its transition to 75th and Madison, in the midst of the uptown gallery district, the Whitney has now acquired something it sorely lacked: architectural identity...

...Born in Hungary in 1902, Breuer became, first, a student under Gropius at the Bauhaus, then, during World War II, a partner with Gropius in an architectural firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts...

...For the galleries, they have devised a system of portable exhibition walls and flexible lighting arrangements that can divide and conquer the exhibition areas at will and should accommodate the most diversified exhibition schedule the Whitney's curatorial staff could devise...

...For strangeness of shape in an urban setting, the Whitney is on a par with Frank Lloyd Wright's spiralling Guggenheim Museum, but where Wright's building was an architectural tour de force-a monument to the architect first and a museum second-Breuer's building gives every evidence of having been shaped by functional necessities...

...It has what might be called a rigorous elegance, achieved through the uncommon use of common materials...

...With their bare walls and the strict plainness of the polished stone benches on the landings, they are spaces set aside for that old-fashioned practice: recollection in tranquility...

...Even the odd shape of the building-an inverted ziggurat-is a straightforward articulation of the architects' handling of a spatial problem...

...Whatever the limitations of the site, the gallery spaces appear large and impressive...