Creativity and Reality. The art of Building Future Cities. Proceedings

The contribution investigates the theoretical-design research methodology of a didactic experience - within the PhD in Theory and Design of the Architecture of Sapienza - on compositional methods and strategies of transformation in the design of the existing. Selecting as a field of design experimentation some significant 'architectural texts' of the twentieth century, the Whitney Museum by Marcel Breuer, (New York 1966) becomes the case study through the formal analysis of the work in order to intervene with actions of adaptation and manipulation of the original form. The choice to work on Marcel Breuer's Whitney Museum of American Art was born out from the curiosity to understand the reasons why it has been impossible to extend it, despite the numerous projects developed from the 1980s by Michel Graves, and then by Oma, up to Renzo Piano, who then built the new Whitney in the Meatpacking District. Breuer himself had developed some ideas about the extension of the museum, as described in some sketches. (Breuer Digital Archive, University of Syracuse). This curiosity was then strengthened by a meeting with A. Yaneva who had an experience as an ethnographer in OMA's studio during the elaboration of the NeWhitney project: the design process of Koolhaas's studio becomes for her an observatory to retrace the many controversies that have involved the Whitney in the impossibility of its expansion, for which, she came to the conclusion that the reasons behind the stories of the inextensibility of an icon of modernity do not find an answer "along the (…) aesthetic plan of architectural practice” (Yaneva 2018). The prospect of the loss of autonomy of the specific language of architecture in this interesting provocation has intensified the desire to deepen the study of Breuer's building in order to understand the generative grammar of this architecture and to attempt a project of a possible transformation. We then restart from those sketches by Breuer and proceed to a close-reading of the building that produces a figural analysis for the manipulation of the form of this architecture. A sort of theoretical action that assumes the Whitney as an ‘opera aperta’ able to host the space of the project as 'artistic practice' in its most authentic meaning, that is, that essential and sensitive device that portrays the changes of our time and introduces them into the forms of architecture.