The Whitney Museum has built itself a new home in downtown Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. Opened in 2015, the project substantially enlarges the Whitney’s exhibition and programming space, enabling the first comprehensive view of the Museum’s growing collection, which today comprises more than 19,000 works of modern and contemporary American art.

Opened in 2015, the new Whitney Museum of American Art substantially enlarges the Whitney’s exhibition and programming space, enabling the first comprehensive view of the Museum’s growing collection, which today comprises more than 19,000 works of modern and contemporary American art.

Formerly located on Madison Avenue in the building designed by Marcel Breuer in 1966, the new museum is situated in New York’s vibrant Meatpacking District. Fronting onto Gansevoort Street, the site lies between the Hudson and the High Line, Manhattan’s recently completed elevated urban park, built on a disused elevated spur of the 1930s New York Central Railroad.

Clad in pale blue-grey steel panels, the eight-storey building is powerfully asymmetrical, with the bulk of the full-height museum to the west, Hudson-side, with tiers of lighter terraces and glazed walkways stepping down to the High Line, embracing it into the project.

The Museum is entered via a dramatically cantilevered ‘largo’, a public space that serves as a kind of decompression chamber between street and museum, a shared space, with views to the Hudson and the High Line entrance just a few steps away. Accessed from the ‘largo’, the main entrance lobby also serves as a public gallery –of free-entry exhibition space.

Level three houses a 170-retractible seat theatre with double-height views over the Hudson River, along with technical spaces and offices.

Some 50,000 square feet of gallery space is distributed over levels five, six, seven and eight, the fifth level boasting a 18,000 square feet, column-free gallery – making it the largest open-plan museum gallery in New York City. This gallery is reserved for temporary exhibitions and its expansive volume enable the display of large works of contemporary art. The permanent collection is exhibited on two floors, level six and seven. These two floors also step back towards the west to create 13,000 square feet of outdoor sculpture terraces.

Museum offices, education centre, conservation laboratories and library reading room are situated north of the building’s core on levels three to seven, including a multi-use theatre for film, video and performance on level five.

Finally, on the top floor is the ‘studio’ gallery and a café, naturally lit by a skylight system in saw-tooth configuration.