The move of the Whitney Museum of American Art from its Marcel Breuer-designed quarters on Manhattan's Upper East Side to the city's Meatpacking District presented a host of challenges, flooding among them. The museum knew that the new downtown site-sandwiched between the Hudson River and the increasingly popular High Line-would be at risk in an intense storm. That's one of the reasons why the building's architects, Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW) and Cooper Robertson, opted to locate the permanent galleries and art storage for the recently opened museum (record, May 2015, page 181) in the upper reaches of the eight-story structure. It is also why they raised the lobby a foot and a half above the 500-year-flood plain.
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