945 Madison Avenue

945 Madison Avenue, also known as the Breuer Building and formerly the Whitney Museum Building, is located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, New York City. Built from 1964 to 1966 as the third home of the Whitney Museum of American Art, it subsequently held a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Frick Collection before becoming the headquarters of Sotheby's auction house. Marcel Breuer and Hamilton P. Smith were the primary architects, with Michael H. Irving as the consulting architect and Paul Weidlinger as the structural engineer. 945 Madison Avenue was Breuer's most significant design in New York City and one of the most important of his career. It was also his first museum commission, and his first and only remaining work in Manhattan.

Site

The museum building occupies the southeast corner of the intersection of Madison Avenue and 75th Street. one block east of Central Park, in Manhattan, New York City. The original building's site measures around , occupying almost . The site was formerly occupied by six 1880s rowhouses like those that surround it; It became an upscale commercial area by the mid-2010s, surrounded by retail shops for global fashion brands, luxury condominiums, and a large Apple Store. The 21st-century site changes were partially attributed to development spurred by the Met Breuer's opening at the building in 2016. == Architecture ==

Architecture

945 Madison Avenue was designed for the Whitney Museum of American Art by Marcel Breuer & Associates primarily Breuer himself and his partner Hamilton P. Smith. Michael H. Irving was the consulting architect, and Paul Weidlinger was the structural engineer. Breuer was originally a student of the Bauhaus architecture and design school, though he later became one of the leading figures in "New Brutalism" or Brutalism. or part of the larger Modernist movement. It has been associated with Brutalism due to its large top-heavy massing and its use of exposed raw concrete. The building's Brutalist features were noted by Ada Louise Huxtable in 1966 and Phaidon's Atlas of Brutalist Architecture, published in 2018. When the Metropolitan Museum of Art was a tenant of the building, the museum's curators discouraged the structure's association with Brutalism, saying that Breuer never associated himself with the style, and that contrary to the Brutalist aesthetic, 945 Madison had a colorful, yet subtle, spectrum of colors, and that it overall was supposed to engage visitors. The building's use of concrete was described by Sarah Williams Goldhagen as more of an ideological position than an aesthetic; Goldhagen stated that progressive architects at the time had to choose between using steel and glass or reinforced concrete, typically adhering to one design choice or the other. Steel and glass began to become associated with commercial buildings and mass production, while concrete gave the impression of monumentality, authenticity, and age., based on the Tower of Babel stele The design of the five-story building,