Formal Manipulations of Breuer’s Whitney

The theme starts from the controversy over the inextensibility of the Whitney Museum of American Art to figure out the reasons for the impossible transformation of Breuer's work. Numerous projects conceived from the 1980s to the early 2000s addressed the challenge of its expansion; Breuer himself had thought about the expansion of his Whitney, as evidenced by five author's sketches (part of the Marcel Breuer Digital Archive at Syracuse University) that show different solutions of juxtaposition to the original building. These considerations found a didactic space for the theoretical-design research proposal developed within Sapienza’s Doctorate of Architecture Theories and Design on compositional methods and transformation strategies in the design of the existing. The Whitney is the architectural text that, through formal analysis, the doctoral students explored by each developing their own proposal of possible extensions with actions of adaptation and manipulation of the original form, generating new architectural configurations. Compositional diagrams and critical models were the conceptual and operational tools adopted by the doctoral students in manipulating the form. The different projects are arranged by thematic cores that combine the different expressive registers of formal actions in the new in relation to the original work. Inside, Inside-Out, Out are the terms of a vocabulary of the manipulation project taken as devices of form and strategies of intervention in the transformation of the existing.