(gentle piano music)
- [Steven] We're standing on the corner
of East 75th Street at Madison Avenue
looking at one of my favorite buildings
in all of New York.
This is now know as The Met Breuer,
but it was built as the home
of the Whitney Museum of American Art
by the architect, Marcel Breuer.
- [Naraelle] Breuer is know for his association
with the Bauhaus and with Walter Gropius.
- [Steven] Gropius recognized his brilliance early on,
took him under his wing and soon enough,
he became a master.
- [Naraelle] At the Bauhaus,
he didn't actually do architecture.
He's best known for his furniture designs,
especially his cantilevered Cesca chair,
and what's now known as the Wassily chair.
- [Steven] Breuer spent his professional career
rethinking materials for use not only in furniture,
but ultimately large institutional structures
like the one before us.
- [Naraelle] And he was fascinated by contrasts.
So if you think about his design for the chair,
or in this case, the cantilevered facade
of the Whitney building, it seems to be floating on air.
- [Steven] Modernist masters like Mies van der Rohe
or Corbusier often created recessed shadows
so that the bulk of the building above seemed to float,
but this is a building that feels massive.
- [Naraelle] It looks nothing like
what you would think of as a typically
international style modernist building.
It's clad in granite, but that facade
is broken up by these very unique trapezoidal windows.
- [Steven] They animate the surface,
but they also function practically.
Like a bay window, they allow us to see
not just across the street, but up the avenue.
- [Naraelle] Breuer had come to the US
specifically to work with Walter Gropius,
and their mainstay had been domestic architecture,
building houses.
- [Steven] The Whitney Museum began its life
in townhouses, formerly private homes
that were joined together.
The museum next moved close to the Museum of Modern Art
in midtown, but it's interesting to see
the more human quality of this building
relating back to those domestic aspects
that defined the early Whitney Museum.
Breuer looked at this building almost
as if it were a sculpture,
and in that way, I think he was competing
with Frank Lloyd Wright's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
which is just a few blocks down the street.
- [Naraelle] Breuer is known as one of the leading
architects in a movement called New Brutalism,
which is named for béton brut,
the French word for rough concrete.
- [Steven] But the title also references
the sense of massiveness of these buildings
that can for some people be off-putting.
He's distanced us by protecting the building with a moat,
as if this was a medieval fortress.
But he's also created this lovely fixed
drawbridge with a low canopy that really
does draw us in and creates a ceremonial entrance
in a way that references the massive stairs,
for example, just a few blocks away
in front of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
We've crossed over the threshold
where the drawbridge doesn't quite connect
with the mass of the building itself,
and we've walked into this spacious lobby.
- [Naraelle] It's spacious and yet it's so intimate.
- [Steven] The most mesmerizing aspect
of the lobby though, is the lighting above us.
- [Naraelle] The ceiling is covered in a grid
of circular aluminum concave light fixtures.
- [Steven] And there's so many of them,
the effect is just dazzling,
especially against the more sober,
warm gray concrete walls that surround us.
- [Naraelle] And the walls have been brush-hammered,
which means a machine has been used to puncture
the surface to give it a rough-hewn texture.
Breuer also intentionally left the imprint
of the forms used to pour the concrete.
- [Steven] In many parts of the building,
you can actually see traces of the grain
of the wood that was used to mold the concrete.
- [Naraelle] And the seams between the panels
of the concrete are also intentionally left visible.
And so the wall really bears visual witness
to the history of its own making.
- [Steven] A very modernist idea,
and in stark contrast to the aesthetic of the white box,
which was so dominant at museums
such as The Museum of Modern Art.
The galleries themselves are large,
flexible, open spaces with high ceilings.
These galleries can be configured and reconfigured.
- [Naraelle] And that would be done
with sliding panels that are attached
to rails installed in the ceiling.
The other interesting thing about this ceiling
is the gridded series of cast concrete coffers.
New Brutalism really looked back to massive stone
and concrete architecture of the ancient world,
for instance, the coffers and the ceiling
of the Pantheon in Rome.
But these coffers are a little bit different
because they're hollow.
- [Steven] That allows us to see up through them
to the exposed mechanicals of the building.
You can see the pipes, you can see the wiring.
Even in this later stage of Breuer's career,
he's still wedded to those foundational ideas
that come out of the Bauhaus.
We're sitting on a low bench in a part of the museum
that is not entirely part of the museum.
This is the staircase.
- [Naraelle] He's treated a functional purpose
for the building with such care.
- [Steven] It's dark and it's quiet.
- [Naraelle] And as we move down from the upper floors,
we proceed from this very enclosed,
almost tomb-like space,
into a space fronted by windows
that give us views back into the city.
- [Steven] And there is beautiful attention to detail.
- [Naraelle] We're looking straight at an architectural
detail that was very important to Breuer,
the bronze and wooden handrail,
two materials chosen specifically
because they would acquire a patina overtime.
- [Steven] The Whitney Museum of American Art,
the museum for which this building was constructed,
has moved out into a new building in the West Village.
This building is now being leased
by The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
It will be interesting to see what the fate
of this building is going forward.
- [Naraelle] But it already has a somewhat storied history.
There have been attempts by three different
architects to design expansions for this museum.
- [Steven] The first, and probably the most famous,
was by Michael Graves, an architect
who's associated with post-modernism.
That design was largely ridiculed for subsuming
the building, and this gets to the tension
that architects often feel.
A building must be functional,
but it's also meant to be a work of art.
(gentle piano music)