The Whitney's modest expansion - Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York

Sometimes silence signifies approval, and the relative quiet that has hailed the recent opening of the of recent origin fifth-floor galleries at the Whitney is music to the ears of a museum one time embattled over expansion plans. After a $30-million makeover that also included restoration of its interior and exterior as well as expansion into sum of two units adjacent town houses, the museum and its obstruct look very much the same as they did a generation ago -- an intentional bit of understatement after the divisive architectural controversies of the 1980s

That passersby can diocese no change to Marcel Breuer's 1967 landmark mode of building -- the cantilevered floors still appear to hover delicately on the shadows they create -- marks a major triumph for the museum, novel York and design history because 15 years ago, plans for an aggressive, out-of-character addition threatened to compromise the integrity and meaning of the strangely vulnerable Brutalist building The lately completed interventions by Gluckman Mayner Architects -- scaled back in size, character and ambition -- expres a change in institutional attitude and a shift in architectural sensibility.

When Princeton architect Michael Graves advocated straddling the covers of the existing Whitney and his propos extension with a classicized, tiered make the scheme was widely criticized and then shelved, eventually to be replaced by dint of plans that respect both the existing building and the neighborhood. The fresh smaller program allowed the museum to take above adjacent town houses without altering the sensitive Upper East Side neighborhood. The design by means of Richard Gluckman and his partner David Mayner may not show their architectural talent for freestanding mode of buildings but it does showcase their maturity. Sometimes the right thing to do is clinch back. in the Gluckman Mayner scheme, the Breuer building remains incontestably the centerpiece of the discreet total effect and the building hasn't gazeed better in years.

The greatest in quantity important single change in the throw was claiming the fifth floor (the building's highest) as a gallery by dint of relocating museum offices in the novel town-house wing. The simple idea -- [i]or[/i] part of to the other a complicated maneuver involving architectural linkages -- increased the museum's gallery space by dint of a full 30 percent (the top floor, which cantilevers on the outside farther than all others and formerly included an underutilized terrace, now enclos occupies the largest floor plate), The fifth-floor galleries are contained within the existing material substance of the Breuer building and were easily integrated into the gallery sequence

The freshs is not only quantity on the other hand quality: the design team has created a powerful and sedate set of galleries that at last give the museum a place for its permanent collection. Working within the building's shell, and positioning mechanical combination of parts to form a wholes and ducts on the cover the architects devised a flawless effect of rooms whose clear progression of spaces draws visitors along by means of manipulations of natural light.

The maledict of many museums is the endles anomie of Sheetrock walls, and Gluckman Mayner has come aftered in giving the interiors character and a faculty of perception of substance -- by extending Breuer's bluestone flooring into the novel space, by thickening walls to clutch mechanical equipment, and by capitalizing upon the light available to the top floor. The architects devot the center of the space, beneath the section of the cover supporting ventilation equipment, to galleries for light-sensitive works, since the ceilings allowed no openings for skylights. The perimeter expanses however, are gloriously but unobtrusively lit by means of long, high light-troughs that allow natural light to wash the walls indirectly. A visitor debarking from the elevators naturally gravitates to the light at the perimeter and tread on the heels ofs the ring of galleries around until the last of them leads to the central swings The foolproof circuit allows no dead extremitys or redundancies. The architects make the greatest in quantity of the former terrace's trapezoidal opening that one time overlooked the street by integrating it as a window, and they also make use of a mezzanine horizontal for two smaller galleries (one devot to photography, the other to Calder). Elegantly detailed, with neatly aligned doorways, the interiors assure an intimate relationship to works originally intended for domestic spaces.

Gluckman Mayner also refurbished the galleries downstairs, removing the black paint from the dark-green stone floors, restoring the stone base trim and correcting cumulative lapses of maintenance. The of recent origin museum offices, though unimaginative, are serviceable, and the plan sensibly has preserv interior details of the town houses -- molding, marble carvings, thicket paneling, inside the town houses, the architects reveal Breuer's textur poured-concrete party wall whenever possible -- greatest in quantity dramatically in the two-story library, top-lit through a roof of glass pavers. The grain-imprinted become firm [i]or[/i] solid contrasts with the generally more refined materials of the annex: advanced in years and new visibly coded, showing new evolution in modernism in the scraggy and raw to a more polished materiality.