Whitney Museum of American Art, ca. 1974.

Designed in the Brutalist style by Marcel Breuer in 1966, the building was the third location for the Whitney Museum of American Art. (The first two locations were on West Eighth Street and West 54th Street, respectively.) The modernist building with gray granite and reverse ziggurat facade was (and still is) a stark contrast to the surrounding 19th century brownstones, brick row houses, and postwar apartment buildings. The facade is made of 1,500 granite slabs with each weighing between 500 and 600 pounds). Ada Louise Huxtable, the New York Times architecture critic, said of the design, “the taste for its disconcertingly top-heavy, inverted pyramidal mass grows on one slowly, like a taste for olives or warm beer.”

The museum always struggled with not enough space and finally in 2015 moved into a new building in the Meat Packing District. In 2016 the Metropolitan Museum of Art moved into the uptown building to display exhibitions that focus on modern and contemporary art.