Sotheby’s has tapped Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron to head renovations for the brutalist Breuer building, purchased by the auction house last year to be the new site of its New York headquarters.
The auction house acquired the building in a private deal from the Whitney Museum of American Art, which was located at the Breuer before its move to the Meatpacking District in 2015. Since then, the Breuer served as a home for contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which put $15 million towards upgrading the building. From 2021 to this past March, the building served as the temporary home of the Frick Collection.
In June 2023, the New York Times reported that Sotheby’s would purchase the historic building from the Whitney for an estimated $100 million. Funds from the sale will go towards growing the Whitney’s endowment.
The revamp of the five-story building will take place over the course of the next year and is expected to be finished by fall 2025. Sotheby’s CEO Charles Stewart has said the company will preserve the Breuer’s interior lobby.
Originally built in 1966 and designed by Bauhaus-trained architect Marcel Breuer, the building stands out visually from other surrounding buildings in the Upper East Side. It was considered at one point an eye sore for its brutalist style, until decades later being affirmed as a key part of modernist architectural history.
The building’s status last year became a question for preservationists. In December, Docomomo US/New York Tri-State, an advocacy group that follows plans for major 20th-century buildings, filed a request with the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission to get the Breuer’s interior spaces official landmark status, which would bar them from being redesigned, the Times reported. (ARTnews could not indepdently confirm this.)
The renovations come at a time of flux for the auction house. Owned by Patrick Drahi, Sotheby’s has $1.8 billion of debt and laid off dozens of UK staff in the July. Earlier this month, Stewart announced the auction house had completed an investment deal with Abu Dhabi’s sovereign-wealth fund, giving the house a needed capital injection of $1 billion.
