The auction residence buys an architectural icon in New York

There were rumors for a long term that the public sale house Sotheby’s wanted to collect the former constructing of the Whitney Museum. Now it’s reputable that the business enterprise, which has been based totally on York Avenue in the Upper East Side for 40 years, will buy the building on Madison Avenue, also in the Upper East Side. A buy rate become now not formally introduced, but the New York rumor mill is rumored to be a touch over a hundred million greenbacks.

The news is extra than a message from the always overheated New York real estate market. Because the concrete building with its dark gray granite cladding was designed through none apart from the Bauhaus architect Marcel Breuer and moved into in 1966 as the first separate building of the Whitney Museum for American Art, founded in 1931. Although positioned in the road line with a fire wall to the neighboring residence, the constructing with its 3 sticking out paragraphs and the few window openings protruding like loopholes immediately stuck the attention. Of course, the “Breuer Building”, as it has usually been referred to as, is a monument.

The Metropolitan Museum paid $eight million a yr in lease

The Whitney has hosted infinite exhibitions here, in particular its own biennial, that's now in all likelihood the simplest one prepared through a unmarried museum and not through a city. There has always been grievance of the premises that they may be not huge and excessive sufficient and have too little daytime. Present. After the Whitney Museum moved to the brand new building designed by Renzo Piano in southern Manhattan in 2015, the Breuer Building became handiest used quickly. First it rented the Metropolitan Museum for its current branch, which changed into not specially a hit and, at an anticipated $eight million a yr in hire for the duration of the pandemic, too massive a piece. The “Breuer Building” is currently used as an alternative quarters for the Frick Collection, that's currently being renovated.

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With the proceeds from the sale, the Whitney can support its basis capital, which changed into badly confused by way of the move. Sotheby’s, then again, gets a brilliantly installed cope with this is famous in the course of the art world. You couldn’t live in a more lovely manner, even if the building will truely need to be rebuilt and tailored to its new motive. The condo contract with the Frick Collection results in August 2024, then Sotheby’s will take over, and the public sale house may also already be capable of offer a beneficiant exhibition similarly to its auctions within the spring of 2025. The billionaire owner of Sotheby’s considering 2019, the French-Israeli media and telecommunications entrepreneur Patrick Drahi, is probable to have landed a real coup with this purchase. Incidentally, in 2021 Sotheby’s completed its previous file turnover of seven.Three billion dollars and opened its sixth European department in Cologne.