The High Line's New Museum
April 19, 2015 6:17 AM   Subscribe

A New Whitney It has been interesting to watch the High Line progress from nothing more than a dream to its current wonderful reality mixing green, gleam and grit. Jason's early unauthorized foray introduced many around these parts to the High Line. Now the Whitney moves in.
posted by caddis (11 comments total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Oh man. Kimmelman is absolutely terrified of having an opinion. I mean, dude. It's okay. You're going to get it wrong sometimes. Take a risk. Meanwhile, a review like this is no better than a building with indecisive, context-oblivious architecture.

Oh, I get it. This whole review is performance art, right?
posted by thejoshu at 7:43 AM on April 19, 2015 [1 favorite]


I liked the digital visual aids...
posted by shivohum at 8:43 AM on April 19, 2015 [1 favorite]


The article compares it to Piano's Pompidou Center. When I visited that as a child it was a marvel of postmodern whimsey. I visited again last year and it was decrepit, dirty, and looked anachronistic and out of character for Paris.
posted by spitbull at 9:50 AM on April 19, 2015 [1 favorite]


I love how Chelsea's "status" has been "ratified." The whole article takes a celebratory tone re: the displacement of the not-wealthy. I suppose that is nothing new for the NYT but FFS this is just a museum.
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:55 AM on April 19, 2015


I don't think the tone is particularly celebratory; I read this with pangs of critique: "Now New York is a safe, glamorous tourist mecca and 24-hour, family-friendly spectacle". If Chelsea is ratified, it's because it's turned into the UES, another moneyed crowd, etc.

But I agree in general that Kimmelman's piece is way too neutral.

For what its worth, I was by the area last week, and was surprised to realize that I really liked the building, at least just from the facade. It's not showy; "nautical" is right, and it relies a bit on a factory-aesthetic, the two sets of steel switchback stairs turning into prominent lookout points.

The facade/form is ugly, in a sanitized-yet gorgeous/lovable way. I bet a million people are going to hate it, and that artists are going to begrudgingly learn to love it ('well, uh, it's not horrible'). It doesn't fall into the starchitect trap of relying heavily on glazing or singular formal gestures to create a precious jewel of a building, which is so, so needed in that area.

It's a huge building and represents, in many ways, a downfall of NYC creative culture, but I'd rather have something ugly and bold, something that has the capacity of becoming dirty and decrepit, than not.

-

When I went to the Pompidou Center a few years ago, I couldn't help but breathe a sigh of relief; to me, the hyper-preservationist architectural/urban-planning attitude of Paris is a kind of oppressive/racist system that actively generates the housing project-esque banlieues ringing central Paris. The Pompidou Center in that light, was a total oasis, a building that wears its mechanical and plumbing systems on its sleeve, in a city that banishes its immigrant labor and growing multiculturalism to the outskirts..
posted by suedehead at 10:57 AM on April 19, 2015 [2 favorites]


Kimmelman's review has introduced me to a new word that mean not much of anything: "deracinated". Another New York Times article Not Good Enough for MetaFilter.
posted by oneswellfoop at 1:30 PM on April 19, 2015


I have to say that plaza on the east (?) side is an interesting echo of the uptown building. Unlike current opinion, I'm a fan of brutalism, and mid-century design in general, and I liked the museum though I only got to visit it twice when I lived out there.

I think the review is tentative because, as with Pompidou, this is an advancement of the traditionally-bounded concerns of designing "a museum" and all of this intentionality about opening the gallery views and expanding the interactivity with the surroundings has yet to be fully proven, and may depend on how the immediate neighborhood responds to the opening of the Whitney over time.

There's similarly tentative (well, in some corners, not at all tentative) concern about the expansion and reorientation of MoMA. Did we have a thread about that?
posted by dhartung at 3:22 PM on April 19, 2015


New Whitney? Not likely.
posted by mrgrimm at 8:59 PM on April 19, 2015


It doesn't fall into the starchitect trap of relying heavily on glazing or singular formal gestures to create a precious jewel of a building

Although I actually agree with you, the building feels vaguely reminiscent of a less whimsical and less colorful version of the Stata Center.

The building's "industrial" characteristic is appropriate (a risky but well-executed revival of brutalism), but I think that the effect is largely ruined by the painted metal cladding, which largely looks cheap, and seems unlikely to age well. The first similar building that came to mind was that unfinished/doomed mall in the Meadowlands....

Similarly, the building still has a few too many of the acute angles that starchitects seem to love, coupled with tons of unnecessary/expensive cantilevering.

If the interior gallery spaces are functional and inviting, I can forgive a lot about the building's exterior. However, for what the thing probably cost, it seems like a poor compromise. While the stark industrial characteristic was a good start, the effect is ruined by the number of gratuitous high-profile architectural motifs that were added on top. There's too much going on, and not enough to tie it all together...
posted by schmod at 9:50 PM on April 19, 2015


Also, modern art museums need to stop trying to cop the aesthetic of the Tate Modern.

The Tate works exceptionally well in in its context, and other museums should strive to be original, and appropriate in their own contexts.

The Tate and the High Line work well because they layer a restrained modern aesthetic on top of existing industrial architecture.

The new Whitney building is manufactured, and seems like it tries too hard to fit in, and (still) doesn't have enough restraint.
posted by schmod at 9:56 PM on April 19, 2015 [1 favorite]


The Pompidou Center in that light, was a total oasis, a building that wears its mechanical and plumbing systems on its sleeve, in a city that banishes its immigrant labor and growing multiculturalism to the outskirts..

How many years ago? That wearing of its systems on its exterior has not worn well at all to my eye. The structure looks precarious and -- above all, to me -- filthy and old, more like a science fiction dystopian movie set than the YAY FUTURE effect it had on me in my adolescence (when I admired IRCAM, underneath the plaza, especially).

I'm not a big fan of Paris either -- don't get me wrong. It's not that I feel Pompidou disrupts something better. When I walk around that city, what I hear from all the beautiful stonework and perfectly laid out parks is the crying of the dead West Africans and Native Americans and Algerians (among many others) in the colonies that paid for the opulence of it all. So in a sense, the whole world is Paris' banlieu. But then I'm an anthropologist who hangs out in indigenous communities a lot.

But I don't see a work of postmodernist whimsey that hardly invites in the multicultural Paris you speak of (indeed, it even seemed pretty dead as a tourist attraction when I was there last year, albeit in November) as in any way critically addressing that history, or calling the rest of Paris out for its elegance. To me it seems an accidental dystopian monument, but not like it was intended to be so. It lacks any relationship to the surrounding neighborhood. The setback plaza felt more like no man's land than public space, although it had the usual hawkers and street performers. Could have been the November light.

I don't have a feeling about the New Whitney, even though I've watched it go up on a daily basis and am looking at it now. It's a big modern building whoopee. I'm a bad New Yorker though. I long for any glimpse of the natural world in this city, and for a break from the feeling of interiority that pervades. Big new buildings do little for me. I'd rather see them coming down.
posted by spitbull at 4:37 AM on April 20, 2015


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