Photo Blog: The Met Breuer Opens
By Carina Cha
After a round of museum musical chairs, New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art opened the doors to its new space—at least until 2023—in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s former uptown building. Newly christened the Met Breuer—so named for the building's architect Marcel Breuer, whose design resulted in a dark, concrete, Brutalist inverted cube—two years of renovations did not yield a freshly rethought space as people might have expected.
The floors were polished, the concrete cleaned and chewing gum was “scraped from the holes in the walls,” joked Met CEO and director Thomas Campbell. “We removed the unnecessary wires that inevitably builds up in any building over a period of time,” he continued. Otherwise, not much of the renovations are evident to the naked eye—everything looks the same as they did in the former Whitney building, even down to the reliable Charles Simonds installation, Dwellings (1970–79,) located in the main stairwell, which was not allowed to be moved from the building.
