WHITNEY MUSEUM PLANS MASSIVE EXPANSION

The Whitney Museum of American Art has announced expansion plans with a design by architect Michael Graves that would more than double the size of the museum, adding 134,000 square feet to the 83,500 square feet of the existing building, designed by Marcel Breuer and which opened in 1966.

The design includes 40,000 square feet of exhibition space, allowing the museum to display its permanent collection more effectively. Since 1981 the museum, on Madison Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, has been able to exhibit only highlights from its collection. With the addition, Graves said, “the museum gets to make itself not just an exhibition gallery, but a museum.”

Speaking at a Tuesday press conference, Graves, of Princeton, N.J., described the challenges of the project, including, he said, the fact that Breuer’s building is in itself an artwork. “It does not happen very often that you’re adding to a modern monument,” he commented. The proposal calls for Breuer’s dark gray unpolished granite building to be joined by a structure in pink granite of a similar color value. The addition will also extend above the present museum, rising to 188 feet.