Null and Trapezoid

On or about 6:00 p.m. on Sunday, March 3, 2024, New York City suffered its greatest loss of civic architecture since that Monday of October 28, 1963, when the wrecking ball first landed on old Penn Station. Or at least since Tuesday, April 15, 2014, when the Museum of Modern Art enshrouded the white bronze walls of what had briefly and unintentionally been the jewel of its design collection: the former Folk Art Museum, the masterpiece by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien that had opened so very recently and so very bravely on December 12, 2001 (so very soon after the September when those other great buildings downtown, and much else, were destroyed).

Penn Station and the Folk Art Museum have at least been attended to by history: That winsome old depot is forever enlisted in a self-satisfied but not wholly inaccurate narrative of the origins of the global historic preservation movement in midcentury New York City; that folk-art-versus-modern-art farrago enduringly shapes the reputations of all the architects involved. The problem with the loss of March 3, 2024, is that nobody seems much to have minded—much less noticed.

This new loss is, of course, of the “Frickney”: the extraordinary combination of the former building of the Whitney Museum of American Art—Marcel Breuer’s 1966 Cyclopean gray-granite-and-cast-concrete design at Madison and 75th—and the pride of the Frick Collection of medieval, Renaissance, and early modern art. The Breuer Building has been in useful limbo since the Whitney Museum of American Art—following hilariously bad and justly failed addition proposals from Michael Graves (malicious classicizing symmetry) through Rem Koolhaas (tendentiously awkward formalism) to Renzo Piano (deluxe faux utilitarianism)—decamped in October of 2014 to a new home downtown. The reason the loss of the Frickney has been able to escape appropriate notice is that, at first glance, it doesn’t seem much like a loss. The building isn’t going anywhere—for now. And the art goes back to Henry Clay Frick’s old mansion, now renovated, just five blocks away. But, with its recent purchase by Sotheby’s, the art and antiques auction house, for a hundred million dollars, the Breuer Building as we knew it is disappearing as irretrievably as those demolished classics. What was one of New York City’s crowning civic places will become a shop.

Sotheby’s will reportedly keep its old headquarters in Siberia, on York Avenue. But the marquee location on Madison—and the dignified and disinterested aura of the Whitney and Frick will class up the dealers and auctioneers. Whatever else they plan for their new property is unclear. They’ve indicated that some galleries will be sometimes accessible to nonpaying noncustomers—I guess you’ll be able to go see the Rodins and Koonses most lately for sale, as you might window-shop for the handbags of late capitalism, elsewhere on Madison. But that is not the same as the structure remaining—as it was in principle and practice as one of the city’s great museums—a public building. A former commons—in a city famously starved for public space—has been enclosed. An effectively public asset has been privatized. That such a civic landmark as the old Whitney should now deliquesce into the private sector is a failure of New York City to do good and be great.

To be sure, during our current planetary crisis, in which the built environment factors for about a third of carbon and energy impact, almost any action of adaptive reuse and of retrofitting—even this one—is preferable to “demolition.” That’s an obsolete word from which we must defamiliarize ourselves, long used to decorously normalize the act of destroying useful elements of the built environment and squandering their embodied energy and carbon that generally supersedes any incremental lifetime operational fuel efficiency savings netted from their replacements. The most radically environmentally conscious and cutting-edge museums are not sustainable-esque spectacles, like the new addition to the Natural History Museum, arriving complete with shrubbery on their roofs and media-friendly narratives about LEDs and LEED ratings. Green buildings are old buildings—whether originally good or bad—that we find ways to keep using. This is our only harvest. This is the only consolation, and not an insignificant one, of the Breuer Building being reprogrammed from public culture to private commerce.

Yet the Breuer Building’s architecture is still in danger. While located in a historic preservation district, it surprisingly lacks landmark protection, inside and out. Sotheby’s has emphasized that the lobby (which, in its robust and unprecious way, has tolerated the surprisingly frequent shoveling in of injudicious interior designs for the store and café) will be left alone. And the rest? Sotheby’s chief executive, Charles F. Stewart, smarmed to the New York Times—which, credulous, asked no follow-up—that the auction house’s exciting renovation would be “committed to preserving the integrity of what’s loved about the building.” I hear that slippery promise and think, what’s loved about the building, by me, is that it’s public and perfect as it is.

What should happen is a game of musical chairs: The Frick returns its collection to the velvety shadows of its old mansion, hopefully lifted somewhat by renovation by the time it reopens later this year; Sotheby’s moves into the downtown Whitney, a poorly designed museum but a rich tribute to a certain combination of wealth and taste; the Whitney moves back uptown and commissions a better addition than those sad old proposals by Renzo and Rem. The patrons and matrons of the Upper East Side, chastened by their 2014 loss, allow something a little venturesome on Madison Avenue. Maybe Peter Zumthor, chastened by his late-Elvis lapses at LACMA, makes a comeback. My vote is for something by Deborah Berke, whose studio TenBerke knows so deeply how to solve the problem of our times: to make the old new.

PART OF HOW WE CAN convince ourselves that this is fine is to remind ourselves that the Whitney Museum itself hasn’t disappeared, it’s just moved. But the Whitney’s current building beggars even willful belief. Renzo Piano Building Workshop’s design on Gansevoort Street is a self-referential late-style medley of the studio’s putative greatest hits: white tubular steel, radius curves, metal panelwork, sawtooth roof lights, big bolts, maritime mannerism—all rehashed to dysfunctional results. A decade after his indeterminate contribution, in collaboration with Richard Rogers, to the 1971–77 Centre Pompidou, Piano designed what (after the Breuer Whitney and Louis Kahn’s 1972 Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth) might be the third greatest museum building in the United States: the Menil Collection in Houston. This is a straightforward structure, systematic and modular, humbly wood-clad and expansively porched in the local domestic vernacular, with a simple plan and a complex roof section featuring mannerly and expressive high-tech gadgetry in echo of Paris, that seems to do an unusually good job diffusing the Texas sunlight into the galleries. Or perhaps does that job so performatively and demonstratively, with such emphatically articulated mechanical and formal complexity, that we are pleased to believe that the job is unusually good. I no longer know.

In what was either an accurate understanding that he would never get lightning to strike twice or an inaccurate understanding that he could, Piano and company have repeated variations on these exact gestures to ever-diminishing results. Most unsettlingly in his 2013 black mirror annex to Kahn’s Kimbell, which (because sometime during design development it had been moved up from an appropriate site on a side street to unsuccessfully go toe-to-toe with the champ) destroyed the tall old trees that landscape architect Harriet Pattison had assiduously preserved from the old avenue that once travelled that museum’s grassy promenade: a major order in living wood, mediated by a planted grove of yaupon hollies—also destroyed—inseparable from Kahn’s minor order in concrete and travertine.

At the new Whitney, the great duties of a museum—making the art look its best and choreographing a spatial procession between served and service spaces, between circulation and deliberation, that supports visitors’ meaning-making through memory and anticipation in the visual field—are unfulfilled. The vertical circulation—the definitive dilemma and delight of all design in Manhattan—is reduced to a narrow fire stair; a steep lobby staircase resembling something from an ambitious 1992 renovation of a Polish hotel; and a uselessly transparent elevator. Something about the buttery wood flooring everywhere makes all the art, sculpture especially, look unsettled and all the galleries like circulation space. Something about the proportions of those galleries fails to resolve the human to the urban scale. Scraps of the skyline appear unmethodically through assorted mini-systems of fenestration, inducing restlessness. The back of house was reportedly cramped from day one: Already the Whitney must look to its immediate north, anticipating the demolition of those few picturesque surviving meatpacking warehouses to be found there, in search of more territory. Of the great privileges of the museum’s site, overlooking the Hudson River at the southern terminus of the fashionable High Line Park, desultory miniature platforms and narrow overlooks make the very least. The whole is vertiginous yet claustrophobic. Art is diminished there.

BACK WHEN THE WHITNEY was about to move downtown—ten years ago on Madison Avenue—the upkeep of the Breuer Building had been rather neglected. Perhaps in sublimated protest against the rejections of those pathetic addition proposals or perhaps in the willful manner of those art museums that discover to their strange disappointment (we see you, Fort Worth!) that their building is their greatest treasure.

Happily, the Metropolitan Museum of Art took over the Breuer Building from the Whitney, renting the place out for revolving exhibitions that would have been poorly served by its own relatively bleak galleries for contemporary art. More importantly, it conserved the place (with the expertise of Beyer Blinder Belle), undoing those years of neglect and sharpening and shining everything back up—even remixing, with art historical accuracy, Breuer’s own concoction of a low-sheen wax for the slate floors, to restore, as if liberating a browning Rembrandt from under nineteenth-century lacquer, their original ocher-to-indigo hues. In addition to removing artless soffits and cavalier conduits, it also reportedly pried off a half century of vintage chewing gum from the many inviting nooks in the board-cast concrete interior walls.

In 2021, the Metropolitan moved out and the Frick moved in, installing a taut selection of Vermeers, Goyas, Bellinis, and Fragonards across the second, third, and fourth floors. Now, alas, those paintings return to a semirenovated incarnation of the gloomy mansion of baronial industrialist Henry Clay Frick: a 1914 Newport Petit-Trianon by Carrère and Hastings, plus concessions for public patronage, as intended by Frick for after his death, constituting an airless 1935 palm court and other dainty and portentous fixings by John Russell Pope.

As at many such haunted house museums, it was hard to see the art in the old Frick mansion: All those Gilded Age velvet walls tended, for example, to smother the otherwise scorching carmine sleeves, in some more profound manifestation by mere representation of the same material, with which Hans Holbein the Younger adorned Thomas Cromwell. I remember, from a pre-Frickney visit, only the chandeliers and the furniture. I think the carpets featured those clear plastic protective covers that I associate with grandparents. Today, Annabelle Selldorf Architects (which successfully corralled Carrère and Hastings in its renovation of the nearby Neue Galerie), with Beyer Blinder Belle, have elegantly performed the usual architectural shoehorning and commission-appeasing accomplished by Charles Gwathmey at the Guggenheim and by Renzo Piano at the Morgan. Diligently slotted like Tetris pieces into the Frick complex are a reported $160 million of useful new features: an auditorium, some galleries, offices, and other modern conveniences. When one now views the Frick campus from 70th Street between Fifth and Madison, evidence of these new features—modern-ish, classical-ish—are tastefully easy to miss. Even with these updates, the lament is that, after their parole in the Breuer Building and upon their return to the Carrère and Hastings one, the artworks inevitably relapse to what they once were to Henry Clay Frick’s domestic life: mere decoration.

At the Breuer Building, those same artworks looked the best they have in five hundred years. Consigned again, and for the foreseeable future, to that pile on Fifth Avenue, they will never again, in assembly, be as legible, as powerful, and as deftly arrayed in collaboration with their surrounding architecture and urbanism. No Netherlandish burgher’s parlor could have better served a Vermeer; no Spanish palace a Velázquez; no Beaux Arts salon an Ingres. This is a tribute to the good bones of Breuer’s design, and to a deft installation by the team of Frick curator Xavier F. Salomon, who wrote in the accompanying pamphlet guide, “We hope that the Frick Madison fulfills Breuer’s promise to ‘transform the vitality of the street into the sincerity and profundity of art.’” Collaborating in sightlines and processions through space and across time, architect and curator empower the visitor to use their streetwise urbanity to navigate—past these artifacts in canvas and pigment and stone—backwards in history and across the universe.

LET’S TAKE A QUICK WALK together through the Frickney, shall we? Here we are on the sidewalk on the east side of Madison. We cross the famous pedestrian bridge above the sunken courtyard—defensive moat and eventual paradise—that sets back the ground floor of the building from the avenue. Above, the three great stepped overhangs (exact reversals of the usual Ferris Manhattan setbacks that in all accounts seem to be called an “inverted ziggurat”) concede the precious airspace of the courtyard back to city. They also shelter you—immediately and step by step more intimately—before you’re even inside the building. Ahead is the entrance: glass doors through the double-height glass wall that spans from the ceiling of the lobby above to the floor of the basement-level café below. Passing under those overhangs, you perceive that in their shade the glass wall, formerly reflective as a consequence of the light differential between indoors and out, becomes clear: And so, after seeing where you’re coming from, the avenue behind, you now see where you’re going. After entry, there’s more bridge, but indoors: The sunken courtyard proves to be half of a seamless indoor-outdoor volume of space, divided agnostically—and invisibly when seen from indoors—by that great glass wall. The indoor half is a café, below the indoor half of the bridge. Above, the famous array of shallow circular lighting fixtures. The bright ceiling and dark split slate floor sustain the same ratio of above-to-below illumination in your visual field outdoors, but they dial down the lumens by a few factors of ten, working with your irises as they open.

The Breuer Building is a relatively small museum. It has scale, not size. The top-floor gallery feels immeasurably lofty, but measures only seventeen feet, six inches from its dark slate floor to its dark coffered ferroconcrete ceiling. The two lower galleries are a mere eight-feet-nine-inches in height. A 103′ 8′′ × 125′ footprint (exactly six demolished townhouses’ worth), seven stories high, enclosing some 70,000 total square feet, of which 30,000 are galleries. A very big town house. Or a very small palace. So, the back of house presses detectably up against the front. The public elevator is also a freight elevator, and so is gloriously about twelve by sixteen by twenty feet— volumetrically, almost the equal of the very small wooden houses with which the Hungarian exile Breuer began his American career. When I was a small boy, visiting New York from Australia not long after a hellish layover in Los Angeles, this big elevator delighted me more than had all of Disneyland.

Here we are on the fourth floor, the double-height level expressed outdoors in the upper half of the façade: the piano nobile. Appropriately for those who enjoy the company of nobles, it’s mostly the patricians of eighteenth-century France (plus some sturdy Reynolds portraits of their British cousins). The curators have arrayed some busts by Houdon, plus a spherical clock, to greet you as you alight the elevator: One tilts her head, seemingly to address you, to her own left. Turning, as one tends to, to your own right, you nevertheless—down the long narrow gallery to your left, as if seen down the orderly allées so beloved by André Le Nôtre espy the eye-catching freestanding column that terminates the vista, or rather the vista within-a-vista, that is Reverie (1790–91), one of Fragonard’s The Progress of Love (1771–91) paintings, in which lovers pursue each other through landscape gardens in the formal French and informal British styles.

So, you double back to check that out, and in so doing are halted by a cross current. Framed in enfilade, the door-after-door array of French interior design, seemingly in a gallery all to herself, is Ingres’s 1845 Comtesse d’Haussonville: that woman in the blue dress with her hand to chin and radically arresting gaze. Doubly framed by the enfilade (and in oblique perspective, their geometry anticipating the vast trapezoid of that window over Madison Avenue) are the frame of the painting itself; and, within the painting, the frame of the mirror before which the comtesse stands. And in which her back—like Madison behind you on the bridge downstairs—is reflected. Her gaze raised to yours within frames within frames, before your own reflecting eyes.

Effortfully diverting your gaze from hers, you arrive at the signature painting, Pursuit (1771–72), of the Fragonard cycle whose prelude, Reverie, you spotted earlier down that long vista from the elevator. The massive painting is almost exactly equal in height to the big Cyclops window to its left: The comedy, equal to Fragonard’s own follies, is that in life as inside the painting, daylight sweeps in from the left, as if New York City light is finding its way into the lovers’ garden—though not into the dark forest behind. That hint of darkness is enhanced by the decision, throughout the galleries, to paint the temporary partitions configuring these effects a deep dove gray, as of the concrete all around—against which the paintings sparkle.

You think you’re done, as you turn to find Breuer’s staircase next to the elevators. But from the end of a long corridor down the full depth of the building, Elizabeth, Lady Taylor—as accounted for by Reynolds circa 1780—catches your eye. Or rather, she is trying to see past you or see through you, all the way through the building and back out through the vast Cyclops window in the distance, with which she has been precisely aligned. Over her right shoulder, another vast window of the scale of the one over Madison, and she another glittering figure, above a low sun, another sky of surprising darkness. You can feel, coursing between that window and the one over Madison, a scintillating cross breeze.

Third floor. Italian Renaissance. Spanish stuff. Very white collars and very black coats. One of those alarming, proto–Francis Bacon popes, popping up like someone informing you on the subway that it’s Showtime. This time, the doormen are gracile 1470s busts by Francesco Laurana and Andrea del Verrocchio—placed to enable a probable Beatrice to regard you as you step off the staircase and turn left. The windowless front room—all the more windowless for your embodied knowledge that it’s under the great Cyclops eye, under the airy Fragonard—is as low and breathless and heated as the indeterminate space—a cellar, a cave—within which Goya’s solemn ironsmiths labor at their forge. The hero of the third floor is Bellini. The little corollary to the great fourth-floor window on Madison is a small third-floor window, a miniature in the same geometry, overlooking East 75th Street. Which pours its daylight onto St. Francis in the Desert, standing before his cozy cave in a fractured cliff front, by a forest—a perfect little city visible over its treetops—as rendered by Bellini in 1480. These galleries extend a bay further north than the ones above and below, reaching the building’s north wall and allowing that small window to perform its duty: Your body, remembering upstairs, knows that like the saint, you have gone farther into something. Bellini’s is a painting of stone and carpentry (the saint’s desk is all joinery in rectangles and parallelograms and trapezoids), conjuring up the Whitney’s own earthy yet stately material palette of concrete, slate, granite, brass, bronze, leather, and teak.

Second floor. Older things, yet. Out of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The greeter at the landing a single tall angel, pointing a supercilious finger right at you. Yes, you. But let’s just get to the Vermeers. Intimate rooms seen from an intimate room. Here, the floor is wood, the feeling thoroughly domestic, Netherlandish—even of the hold of a Company ship. Officer and Laughing Girl, 1657. Some big-hatted rake, his back to us, faces a maiden across a table. Over his left shoulder, a brilliant window in deep oblique—perspectivally constructing a trapezoid so close in proportion and scale to the pearlescent window up on the fourth floor: The role of the Fragonard at catty-corner is played by a map, over the shoulder of the maiden. The lighting and atmosphere within the painting is as in all the galleries: lucid; bright colorful shapes cast softly before drawn patches of light and stretches of shadow; still; close but with an intimation of vast and moody skies somewhere past the trapezoidal window; charged: every mote of dust shimmering with observation, anticipation, memory, potential energy.

The sacrament confirming these encounters with the sublime is the cup of coffee before you hit the street—that far harder Manhattan sublime of Madison Avenue howling infinitely uptown toward its vanishing point. Maybe we’ve been thinking about it since we crossed the bridge downstairs, above the sound of clattering cups and conversation. So, a few more turns down the intimate staircase: short flights, deep mezzanine landings, low ceilings, glimpses of the sidewalk and gutter through low windows. The thing about taking the staircase from the second floor to the basement-level café is that, just as you make that last turn at the base of the last stair, you’re pointed exactly west-northwest, and your eyes are raised in elevation by the sidewalk parapet overlooking the sunken garden, and you take in the sky over the intersection of Madison and 75th. There is so much of it. You think, is it over Central Park? The river? No, just another intersection of hundreds, between mere avenue and cross streets but made to be seen with all the art with which Vermeer made a room, Reynolds a landscape past an open window: all the art of architecture. This patch of sky, all the more for being seen from an opening in the ground, seems as stolen from heaven as Promethean fire.

THE ENCLOSURE OF THE COMMONS that is the commercialization of the Breuer Building is a chapter in more than one story. A story of a merely mercantile town—a pygmy between those giants, Boston and Philadelphia (both, not coincidentally, cities of founding and ongoing civic idealism and block-by-block high-quality architectural design). A town whose longstanding public inhospitableness, even hostility, makes it harder to be a citizen everywhere than merely a customer somewhere. A story of the bittersweet effects of necessarily centering adaptive reuse—even this privatizing one—and problematizing demolition. And a mystery story of how, as a culture, we got from understanding the old Whitney building to be a masterpiece to mistaking the new Whitney for one.

The best buildings are not ones that—like some fleeting social media engagement, like the current Whitney downtown—deliver with their image, the means for a self-satisfying dopamine hit or self-soothing stimulus. They are not buildings whose antic forms and opiate shimmers appease our tech-accelerated horror at the useful discomforts of intermittent boredom, sociable quietude, and premeditative self- consciousness. They are instead buildings that steadily work with you, in a humane and humanist way, in the tart project of being alive. Which includes, for so many New Yorkers, the necessary pains of navigating a big city and the necessary pleasures of looking at art. The best buildings are buildings that, in their material expression and spatial procession, bring you to your senses. In early March, visiting the Frickney for the last time, I remembered this observation by the unusually literary astrophysicist Carlo Rovelli, in his treatise White Holes (Riverhead Books, 2023):

The Breuer Building, especially in relationship to the kaleidoscopic collection of Henry Clay Frick, awoke the sleepwalker. Between Vermeer windows in deep perspectival oblique, and Breuer windows in rectilinear-to-trapezoidal deflection, the Frickney somehow seemed to exchange photons and humanities, across time and space, between Old and New Amsterdam. The Breuer Building achieved this with its restrained refusal to merely charm and in its skillful ability to be of such exacting service. What was ethically good and great about it precisely wasn’t—Charles F. Stewart entirely to the contrary—that it was ever lovable, ingratiating, or winsome. It was as tough as its city, and its welcome was gruff and measured, yet progressively ever more genuine and generous as its spaces unfolded and the visitor eventually arrived downstairs at the café and was sent into the sky. Like a true New Yorker, as the saying goes, it was not nice, but it was kind.

Folks seem to have felt it. During my last visit to the Frickney, a couple of days before the doors closed for good, I ran across a small crowd—relatives, parishioners, pilgrims—packed onto the bench in front of Bellini’s St. Francis. The informal assembly of bodies of very diverse sizes and shapes, in the Vermeer mood of all the galleries, called to mind the companionable little crowd in that painter’s Christ in the House of Martha and Mary (1655). Nobody was looking at their phone. Nobody was a poor posing customer in a fancy store. The matriarch of the group, seated at the end of the bench, was engaged in discourse and communion far deeper than that of any collector or connoisseur—so very freely, in a way I cannot conceive ever happening at Frick’s erstwhile mansion. “Look at the deer,” she told her people, “look at the birds. You see, the thing about Francis is he really cared. About people. About animals.”