It’s good that Peter M. Brant, who knows how to buy art, found Richard Gluckman, who knows how to display it. In 2009, Gluckman renovated an elaborate stone barn in Greenwich, Connecticut, adjacent to a polo field on Brant’s estate (which also includes a Jeff Koons “Puppy” and a house by Venturi and Rauch). The barn became a spectacular exhibition space for the newsprint and publishing mogul’s Brant Foundation. Then, three years ago, Brant hired Gluckman (who is partners with Dana Tang in Gluckman Tang Architects) to create a new outpost of the Foundation on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Brant had bought a former Con Edison substation that was the home and studio of the artist Walter De Maria until his death in 2013. Gluckman, part of the New York art world since 1977, knew De Maria, and the building, well. “Walter would call me if a pipe broke,” he remembers.
The substation was designed 100 years ago by William W. Whitehill, a neoclassicist who knew what he was doing. The midblock building dwarfs the tenements that flank it, and yet it doesn’t seem especially imposing from the street. Thanks to Whitehill’s trompe-l’oeil proportioning of its oversized windows and limestone trim against a ruddy brick facade, it looks almost like another residential building.
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