A First Look at Sotheby’s New Home

I n the changing tides of the New York art world, the inverted ziggurat of the former Whitney Museum of American Art building has remained a stalwart presence. The enigmatic granite-clad monument has weathered the ebb tide of its architect Marcel Breuer’s reputation in the 1980s, the tsunami of controversial proposals for major transformations in 1985 and 2001 and then the uncertainty in the wake of the Whitney’s departure in 2014 for its new downtown digs. After a careful restoration by Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron, the building at 945 Madison Avenue – recently given landmark status – begins a bright new chapter this fall as Sotheby’s new Manhattan headquarters. “When I walk through the space, I feel the proverbial ‘pentimenti’ of the exceptional works of art or exhibitions that previously adorned these walls,” says Lisa Dennison, Sotheby’s chairman, Americas, who served on the architectural selection committee. “We have seen how adaptable the building has been to many different styles and periods of art, especially during the residencies of the Met and the Frick.”

“It’s an iconic structure,” says Wim Walschap, senior partner at Herzog & de Meuron, who oversaw the restoration project. “And it stands as a rare example of brutalist architecture designed specifically for public use.” Breuer’s building will again draw the public in to view art, as it was designed to do, while standing as an artwork in its own right – a monument by its Bauhaus-trained creator to sculptural inventiveness. When it first opened on September 27, 1966, Breuer’s building stood out every bit as much as the nearby Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Frank Lloyd Wright’s upwardly expanding spiral completed a few years earlier. At first glance, it seems the very antithesis of the Bauhaus aesthetic, which preferred volumes rendered transparent through materials such as steel, concrete and plate glass. Breuer himself had achieved early international success with designs of unprecedented lightness and transparency, most notably his tubular-steel chairs and projects for prefabricated houses. The question, then, is how Breuer evolved from a Bauhaus master into a champion of an architectural style dubbed the “New Brutalism” for its love of robust primal forms and frequent use of unadorned raw concrete (béton brut in French)?

Returning to Breuer’s first freestanding building, the Harnischmacher House (1932) in Wiesbaden, Germany, it’s clear it was an expression of visual lightness, one that reinterpreted interior and exterior through the use of large sheets of plate glass. It featured a steel frame that allowed Breuer to cantilever a porch out over the garden.

A veritable showpiece of the modernist impulse, the house might easily have been featured that same year in the epochal first architecture exhibition of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which defined the term and characteristics of the “International Style.” Yet Breuer’s built and unbuilt projects of the next few years, a period when he was urgently seeking a new base of operations in order to escape Hitler’s rise, portray an emerging sensibility in which natural materials enter into dialogue with industrial ones, contemporary techniques are collaged with traditional construction and the heritage of the Bauhaus takes on a new constructional logic. Soon, Breuer’s architectural language would shift dramatically.

From about 1933 to 1935, the Hungarian-born Breuer shuttled between Zurich and Budapest, hoping that some opportunity might take root. In fall 1935, he followed his mentor Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy and other Bauhaus figures to Britain. He remained there for only two years, but it was a fruitful, formative period. The Gane Pavilion in Bristol (1936) announced a wholly new sensibility with its complex collage of materials: plate-glass walls set in a frame of load-bearing, rustically cut stone; interiors clad in thin plywood sheets. A wall that began in the garden continued inside, connecting interior and exterior in a way that would become increasingly prominent in his work after he joined Gropius at Harvard in fall 1937.

In the U.S., Breuer focused on developing his ideas for prefabrication, now attuned to developments in industrialized wood. He and Gropius employed wood in structurally innovative ways, as seen in the designs for their own houses in Lincoln, Massachusetts, which face one another across expansive lawns. They attached clapboards vertically (rather than horizontally as was traditional) to the wood frames, laying them flush to maintain the crispness of Bauhaus volumetric composition, and then juxtaposed this with load-bearing chimney walls, made of white-painted brick for Gropius, of rustic stone for Breuer. Wood construction allowed cuts into the box to create interpenetrating spaces and patterns of shadow. Breuer began to imagine how he might extend his earlier Bauhaus period research into models for prefabricated transportable houses, suitable to facing the impending housing crisis of the post-World War II era – although his proposal to create a house with a laminated-plywood frame over a truss-shaped frame, as light and yet as strong as an airplane wing, never advanced beyond study proposals.

In the end his response to the prevailing conservative, neocolonial taste of Levittown and similar models proffered in the postwar era was the exhibition “House in the Museum Garden” at the Museum of Modern Art in 1949, by which time he had relocated to New York. With its butterfly roof and “binuclear” plan – in which the bedrooms for parents and children are situated at opposite ends of the home – Breuer’s concept was a radical alternative to the Cape Cod Colonial Revival.

Pragmatically, the house was replicable by local builders from a set of drawings the architect could provide. Only a few copies are known, but the design brought Breuer some important new clients, notably Rufus and Leslie Stillman, who visited the MoMA house and contacted Breuer for a new house in Litchfield, Connecticut. Over the next few decades, Breuer’s office designed several more houses for the Stillmans, including a vacation cottage on Cape Cod. Stillman’s colleagues at the Torin Manufacturing Company became clients, and the company built factories to Breuer’s designs as it expanded around the world. Breuer was becoming a designer of a full range of modern buildings, but also an architect of growing networks.

The most daring of all his house designs was built for his own family in the late ’40s in New Canaan, Connecticut, then a magnet suburb for the Harvard-trained modernist architects setting up in the New York market. Here, the system of using triple layers of plywood to form a strong envelope over a truss-like wooden stud box frame was carried to the ultimate as Breuer cantilevered his house off a stone base and then, in turn, cantilevered a terrace balcony off the living room end. (The levitation was short-lived, as already during construction, the sagging terrace threatened collapse and had to be shored up by a stone wall.) Breuer considered multi-ply plywood to be akin to concrete, so there is a continuity of experimentation between the New Canaan house and the great ’50s and ’60s buildings of hollowed-out concrete that he would cantilever over the landscape – like the IBM headquarters at La Gaude, France – or the city, as for the Whitney.

Breuer’s career changed abruptly in 1952-53 with the sudden success in two completely unexpected undertakings for large-scale institutional buildings: UNESCO in Paris and St. John’s Abbey in Minnesota. These commissions shifted his practice forever, requiring a new life of air travel, more associates and consulting engineers to support his search for new structural possibilities. The quest for sculpturally expressive monumental forms that could embrace serial normality and the heroics of modern engineering became the major theme of Breuer’s work for the next three decades. In Paris, the powerful canted forms of the UNESCO Conference Building, built with plaited concrete, played off the glazed curtain wall of the Y-shaped Secretariat, which was raised on muscular concrete pilotis. The same could be said of the contrast between the similarly formed Abbey Church, with its sculptural bell banner and the repetitive cells of the nearby monastery block and the student residence halls on campus.

“Buildings no longer rest on the ground,” Breuer explained in a 1963 lecture. “They are cantilevered from the ground up. The structure is no longer a pile – however ingenious and beautiful – it is very much like a tree.” He concluded by advocating for an architecture in which sculptural form and its space-making capabilities would lead the modern movement beyond its earlier obsession with new materials. True to his word, in his use of marble at St. John’s or the richly patterned granite of the Whitney – his next headline-grabbing commission – he sought to bring modern architecture into a realm of symbolic expression that had been reserved for older styles. “Although not resting on lions or acanthus leaves,” he noted, “space itself is again sculpture into which one enters.”

Perhaps no building better exemplifies Breuer’s newfound aesthetic of “heavy lightness” than the Whitney. In June 1963, after only eight years in a building designed for them by Philip Johnson on West 54th Street – on land donated by MoMA and adjacent to its own expanding campus – the Whitney’s trustees decided to get out from under their more famous neighbor (and occasional rival) and establish a new presence for American art on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the heart of the postwar gallery scene. Selected over a host of well-known architects, including I.M. Pei, Louis Kahn and Johnson, Breuer quickly appreciated the challenges of the commission and, after a weekend at home in New Canaan, returned with his design for the inverted ziggurat. The museum would be clad in flame-treated granite and would loom out dramatically over the corner of Madison Avenue and East 75th Street. Without violating any building or zoning codes, Breuer took the famous setback skyscrapers of the 1920s and 1930s – as well as the white-brick apartment houses then sprouting up everywhere on the East Side – and turned them upside down. His solution was decidedly singular but also clearly a piece of New York’s urban fabric.

“What should a museum look like, a museum in Manhattan?” Breuer began his presentation to the trustees in November 1963. “It is easier to say first what it should not look like. It should not look like a business or office building, nor should it look like a place of light entertainment. Its forms and its materials should have identity and weight… in the midst of the dynamic jungle of our colorful city. It should be an independent and self-relying unit exposed to history, and at the same time it should have a visual connection to the street, as it deems to be the housing for 20th-century art. It should transform the vitality of the street into the sincerity and profundity of art.”

To enter the building, one takes a sidewalk via a bridge, announced by a cantilevered canopy, under the overhang and into a lobby with a gridded ceiling of circular lighting fixtures. As much as his design resonated with the emerging minimalist scene in 1960s sculpture, Breuer was thinking largely in terms of the stakes of history and symbolism that had entered the internal critique of modernism with the debates on monumentality in the mid-1940s. “Today’s structure in its most expressive form is hollow below and substantial on top – just the reverse of the pyramid. It represents a new epoch in the history of man, the realization of his oldest ambitions: the defeat of gravity,” Breuer told his friend Peter Blake in 1964. With exposed bush-hammered concrete fin walls to separate off his granite-faced, cantilevered sculpture, Breuer cut out the urban equivalent of the white box gallery so beloved by his contemporary minimalists and asserted the singularity of culture, protecting art from the nearby commercial world and conveying a sense of remove from the quotidian.

Working with the structural engineer Paul Weidlinger, Breuer lifted his cantilevered mass above a glazed, recessed ground floor – the world of the sidewalk and the sales counter on axis with the entrance – connected by a fixed-in-place drawbridge. He inserted great panes of glass into the recessed stair tower, providing changing vistas of Madison Avenue with each switchback. These were the first in a series of staccato framed views that find their echo inside in the mysterious trapezoidal “eyelid” windows freely attached, like ornamental broaches, on the blocky exterior. To keep their immense planes of glass from conflicting with the galleries’ reliance on artificial light, the trapezoids angle outward, creating uncanny vignettes of the city while avoiding any capricious play of light in the inner sanctuary. Breuer thus created a building of deliberately contrasting experiences: a lobby based on a new ideal of flow and spatial excitement, in which architecture, large-scale public sculpture and the city converse, and then, above, inwardly focused gallery floors. The largest uninterrupted expanse and loftiest ceilings were reserved for the fourth-floor gallery: a full 118 feet of clear space before the installation of the movable system of panels. Here is the largest of Breuer’s trapezoidal windows, the only one on the Madison Avenue front, framing a view of New York as an unfinished work of urban art.

The building was a capstone of one of the most productive, sculptural and inventive moments of Breuer’s career, and an instant attraction. Perhaps cartoonist Alan Dunn captured the sense of charmed bewilderment best in The New Yorker: Two women walking by wonder aloud, “Why can’t someone design a museum that doesn’t have to be explained?” Indeed, Dunn would repeatedly poke fun at both the Whitney and the Guggenheim as the two heralded a period in which museum buildings would become more and more distinctive, a trend that continues today.

It might seem counterintuitive to have selected Herzog & de Meuron to restore both the exquisite material palette and the complex interplay between the bustling lobby and the contemplative galleries. Some of the most sculpturally and spatially exciting museum buildings of the last three decades have been the firm’s creations, from the Sammlung Goetz, opened in Munich in 1992, to the four-year-old M+ in Hong Kong. They are, in all this work, architects of strong form and complex spatial section to rival Breuer. But as architects who restore, they have shown a broad range of aesthetic expression, from the late Victorian interiors of the Park Avenue Armory to the bluestone floors, egg-crate suspended ceiling and bush-hammered concrete that are Breuer’s signature at the Whitney. “It was one of the buildings I made a point to visit as a young architect,” says Herzog & de Meuron’s Walschap. “Even then I was surprised by how different it felt in context – its geometry and materiality, the composition of its windows and especially the sunken garden, which creates this unexpected piece of public space within the New York streetscape.”

Theirs is a light touch in refreshing that material palette, already so well restored for the Metropolitan Museum’s temporary use of the building, adding primarily a new lighting scheme in the framework of the egg-crate ceiling to suit the much more diverse and rapidly changing display needs of auction exhibitions and showrooms on the three gallery floors. The other major new lighting is under the bridge’s canopy to create a livelier street presence for a building that will have much greater evening life, not least because of a new restaurant on the lower level by New York designers and restaurateurs Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch, of the firm Roman and Williams.

Perhaps most exciting in this new chapter of the building’s life is the animation that Sotheby’s will bring to the building and for which the architects have adapted it. The lobby will feature new displays, with Breuer’s beautiful benches cleverly adapted to display cases and the often-overlooked lofty space beyond the famous elevators given new life as a feature gallery. What the work promises is that Breuer’s building has neither looked so good, nor been so animated in its activity, since the days of the Whitney’s first use of its new architectural masterpiece in the 1960s.

Banner image: Photo: Marcel Breuer papers, 1920-86. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution/Marc and Evelyne Bernheim.

Partially adapted from Barry Bergdoll’s 2016 essay “Marcel Breuer: Bauhaus Tradition, Brutalist Invention” from the Metropolitan Museum Bulletin.