The Pritzker-winning architects Herzog & de Meuron will renovate the modernist Breuer building into Sotheby’s new global headquarters, the auction house announced on Monday, adding that it has completed the purchase of the Madison Avenue building from the Whitney Museum.
The Breuer building, once home to the Whitney, more recently housed the Frick Collection and served as an exhibition space for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s modern and contemporary collection. The renovated building will contain Sotheby’s sales room, as well as exhibition and dining spaces. Work is expected to be completed by fall 2025.
Herzog & de Meuron — known for projects such as Tate Modern in London, the de Young Museum in San Francisco and the Park Avenue Armory in New York — has made a specialty of adaptive reuse, or transforming existing structures.
“By reviving lost spaces, carefully inserting new ones and doing other subtle interventions with a considered palette of materials, the building will be prepared for its new role in the auction world,” Jacques Herzog, one of the firm’s founders, said in a statement, “and will also be more accessible again for visitors and the people of New York.”
Herzog & de Meuron, which is based in Basel, Switzerland, will work with PBDW Architects, a New York firm, on the design.
The five-story building, designed by the Bauhaus-trained architect Marcel Breuer and completed in 1966, is in a landmark district, which gives its exterior protected status, though the building does not have individual landmark designation and the interior is not protected.
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