Lauder to the Whitney: There's No Place Like Home

In an unusual twist on the architectural implications of philanthropic leverage, Leonard Lauder, the Whitney's longtime chairman and mega-benefactor, stipulated that his $131-million gift to the museum, announced on Mar. 19, was conditional on its not selling the landmark Marcel Breuer building of 1963-66. (He wouldn't publicly reveal how long his caveat will remain in effect.) Given the disastrous results of some recent museum building programs, it's easy to understand Lauder's wanting the Whitney to avoid the kind of personality transplant lately suffered by MoMA, to name the most conspicuous local example of how architecture can profoundly change a museum's essential character.

Breuer's obdurate concrete monolith, a squared-off variant on the inverted-ziggurat Guggenheim, fourteen blocks uptown, differs internally from Frank Lloyd Wright's spiral gallery configuration. The rap on both buildings is that they're display spaces from hell. Yet the Guggenheim can make certain kinds of art look great--sculpture in particular, but also certain single-artist surveys, such as the 1978 Rothko retrospective I can still see in my mind's eye. And Whitney curator Donna de Salvo's inspired 2006 installation of Ed Ruscha's "Course of Empire" series tapped into Breuer's powerful surround in a way that enhanced the architectural subject matter of the artist's paired paintings.

Explaining his decision, Lauder told the NY Times' Carol Vogel, "Like so many architecture lovers, I believe the Whitney and the Breuer building are one." That's hard to dispute after one big-name architect after another--Michael Graves, Rem Koolhaas, and Renzo Piano--tried and failed to expand the Whitney over the past 25 years. Graves's ponderous Postmodern proposal and Koolhaas's antic Deconstructivist scheme were unsuitable in antithetical ways, whereas Piano's successive reworkings (in a futile effort to overcome implacable community opposition) became more and more boring,

One retired museum director told me he thought Lauder was making a terrible mistake by trying to control the Whitney's architectural destiny for years, perhaps decades, to come. "You can't create the future by clinging to the past," he warned. But that was easy for him to say, as someone who commissioned a museum building that everyone in the art world still loves. Only time will tell if Lauder has done the right thing, but his enforced moratorium at a moment of notable architectural disarray could turn out to be one of his most valuable gifts to the Whitney.