Outtakes from the Whitney Hearing---Part II

At Tuesday's public hearing on its expansion plans, the Whitney Museum submitted these supportive comments from Hamilton Smith, who was Marcel Breuer's associate architect for the museum's 1966 building:

[Renzo] Piano's design concept neither engulfs nor overshadows the original Breuer Building. Equally important, the main element of the expansion---five gallery floors set back behind the preserved contributing brownstones---creates an expressive interplay between the three elements: original 1966, now proposed, and the historic.

...Original and new contruction do not have contact, are separated by skylit open space and are connected by glazed bridges at each level. This concept comes across to me as an unusually sensitive solution.

...The exterior finish for the new gallery wing is proposed to be matte-finished, stainless-steel alloy panels, affording a quality of relative lightness, rather than of masonry weight. This too comes across to me as sensitive response, being in contrast to the original Whitney's granite facing and the old brownstone of the rowhouses.