Breuer's Whitney Museum: Aesthetic intimidation worked in the 1960s, and still does

Christopher Gray analyzes how a building that "spears every tenet of people-friendly cities" was made sacrosanct among New Yorkers. 

Are we really supposed to like the brooding museum that the Bauhaus-trained Marcel Breuer designed in 1963 for the Whitney Museum of American Art on the East Side of Manhattan? Or is the respectful attitude with which educated people refer to the Whitney a case of their being afraid be seen as "hayseeds"?

In his Nov. 14 Streetscapes column in The New York Times, Gray takes a critical look both at the building and at the way in which it's been received over the years. A few passages:

"A 1963 rendering of the museum shows it almost as it stands, projecting out over Madison Avenue like a medieval fortress, with oddly shaped windows reminiscent of the gun ports of the Maginot Line. But in the rendering the panels of granite are variegated in tone, giving the building a life it does not have today with its more uniform masonry."

"In an article Dec. 12, 1963, Ada Louise Huxtable, the architecture critic for The New York Times, praised the initial design, finding it 'serious and somber,' and 'sympathetic to its neighbors.' But harmony was not, apparently, Breuer’s intent, since in 1966  quoted him as saying that the neighboring brownstones and town houses 'aren’t any good.'

"By this point the elite had accepted modernist architecture, and anyone who protested risked denunciation as a hayseed. But the art critic Emily Genauer, writing in The New York Herald Tribune, also on Dec. 12, cautiously ventured that the new building seemed 'oppressively heavy.'"

"In 1967 the brash new 'A. I. A. Guide to ,' by the architects Norval White and Elliot Willensky, quipped that passers-by should 'beware of boiling oil,' but also called Breuer’s work a must-see. It was as if, as Olga Gueft put it in Interiors Magazine, the high-culture stamp of the Whitney and its trustees made it 'completely invulnerable.'”

"Even in an age where traditionalism has triumphed, Breuer’s granite bunker is still aesthetically bombproof. If its architecture is like a horror movie, it is like a Stephen King horror movie, unimpeachably literate."