The Whitney Museum of American Art is preparing to move into a new Renzo Piano-designed building in New York's Meatpacking District, set to open to the public about a year from now. The new downtown location is vastly larger than its current Marcel Breuer building on Madison Avenue, with 50,000 square feet of indoor exhibition space—a 33 percent increase—and a total of 220,000 square feet, nearly triple the size of the old space. The museum's best attendance year was 372,000 visitors in 2009-10, far below MoMA's 3.22 million that same year, but the new building's proximity to the High Line and tourist-heavy neighborhood is expected to dramatically boost visitor numbers.
This move matters because it positions the Whitney to compete more directly with the Museum of Modern Art for major traveling exhibitions and large-scale installations, especially with its massive 18,200-square-foot fifth-floor gallery that dwarfs anything at MoMA. The Whitney's expansion comes as MoMA is also planning its own expansion, set for completion in 2018 or 2019, signaling an intensifying rivalry among New York's top-tier art museums. The new building's combination of more space and a better location could fundamentally shift the city's museum hierarchy, making the Whitney a more dominant force in the contemporary art landscape.