They’re hoping it won’t be a brutal fight over this brutalist space.Preservationists are pushing to landmark parts of a uniquely shaped Upper East Side building that once housed the Whitney Museum and MET Breuer before auction house Sotheby’s takes over the space.The eye-catching brutalist exterior at 945 Madison Ave.is already protected because it’s within the boundaries of the Upper East Side Historic District, but the oddly shaped building’s interior can be altered in construction without the designation, activists said.“With a change in ownership and a change in use, we fear that portions of [architect Marcel] Breuer’s original interior could be permanently and unsympathetically altered,” architecture preservation group Docomomo US said in a statement on its website.“The seminal interiors of this landmark — probably the best known by this Bauhaus master and among the most significant works of Modern architecture in the city—are not protected by agency oversight and currently could be inappropriately altered without recourse.”The group issued a 45-page request to the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission to landmark the building, since building a coalition of supporters that includes the Friends of the Upper East Side Historic Districts, New York Landmarks Conservancy, Preservation League of New York State and others.The LPC is now considering a landmark designation for sections of the Madison Avenue lower-level, lobby, coat check, main staircase and entrance vestibule — saying in a Dec.
17 briefing document that the building’s “iconoclastic design is unlike anything built in New York City before or since.”The briefing described the building’s exterior as being in “stark contrast with the surrounding 19th century rowhouses” and its interior featuring “open floor plans, distinctive overhead lights, and interconnected public spaces that together create an enduring emblem of modern urban architecture.”The preservation ...