Whitney vs Walkie Talkie

Architects can often be granted dictator like powers, taking charge of the major interventions in our cities. New buildings are designed and inflicted on us, their presence affecting so many, their reward paid to so few. It is both illustrative of the need for good leadership as well as good design. This process works well for the most part – as is the case with New York’s new Whitney Museum of Art by Renzo Piano Workshop. As we’ve seen recently with London’s ‘Walkie Talkie’ it can also be a dismal failure.

What’s great about the new Whitney Museum of Art is that it is not a precious thing. It’s a building that recognises and respects both its function and the people that occupy and enjoy it. It invites users to participate, not only within its confines and contents, but to witness and enjoy the space and views around it. It is fortunate to be positioned at the end of the High Line – a space itself that recycles and integrates within a city that has come to celebrate openness.  The Whitney becomes the reward at the end of your walk where you stop and view the path you’ve travelled. In London, the fashion seems to be to throw up towers and push the lucrative tourist up into the sky where potted plants and restaurants are the tools of attraction – like flowers competing for honey bees attention. We lose connection with the street below, the very space that we all love to wander in, to be transported way up into London’s grey cold clouds. Walk around the city of London at lunch time and witness people, not inside these towers, but spread out in the little squares and open spaces. We seem to have forgotten the joy of our medieval streets, wanting to rise above their clamour to make sense of them.

Ironic then, that in a city like New York, littered with Skyscrapers, the best new architecture and spaces are rooted to the ground.