A Twentieth Century Architectural Text

Within the framework of a design experimentation, the object of research is the context for a meaningful discussion on the potential of the project to transform the Marcel Breuer's Whitney Museum on Madison Avenue. Introverted and laconic, out-of-context, the Whitney Museum appears in its monolithic granite-clad structure, an inverted ziggurat that overturns the typological principles of building codes. The combination of formal oppositions between compositional, structural, and material elements, make Breuer's Whitney Museum an architectural Text to be explored in the depths of its spaces, beyond the inaccessible boundaries of its volume. The paper explores this Breuer’s work studying the results of a design process based on numerous antinomies involving different aspects of form. Two sources for Breuer's in-depth study of the Whitney Museum are the basis of this close reading of the work as Text: a) with the documentation catalogued in the Breuer Digital Archive at Syracuse University; b) Ezra Stoller's photography, a sort of parallel writing produces a narrative that portrays this work in its figurative features. Based on this critical premise, the thematic proposal carried out within the framework of the Doctoral Program in Architectural Theory and Design, allowed doctoral students to launch a theoretical-design experience with a close-reading through compositional diagrams that crossed the Whitney in its textuality.