From the west, along the Hudson River, it looks ungainly and a little odd, vaguely nautical, bulging where the shoreline jogs, a ship on blocks perhaps, alluding to one of New York’s bedrock industries from long ago. It’s a glittery emblem of new urban capital, shipping now having gone the way of so much else in the neighborhood.

From the north, it resembles something else, a factory or maybe a hospital, with a utilitarian wall of windows and a cluster of pipes climbing the pale-blue steel facade toward a rooftop of exposed mechanicals.

And from the east, its bulk suddenly hides behind the High Line, above a light-filled, glass-enclosed ground floor that gives views straight through the building to the water.

By moving downtown from Madison Avenue, the Whitney Museum of American Art does more than drop a cultural anchor at the High Line’s base, in the deracinated meatpacking district.

The move confirms a definitive shift in the city’s social geography, which has been decades coming.

Read more at The New York Times.