Whitney Biennial 2019

John Stanley (Former Chief Operating Officer of the Whitney Museum): There's really two levels at the Whitney Building. One is at the loading dock level, and that's about six feet above the Hudson River. This is on the west side of the building, so that's really the lowest point, and, as I said, only six feet from the Hudson. At the lobby level, it was designed to be slightly above FEMA's 500-year storm level, so it seems like it was more than high enough. A storm that would occur only once every 500 year. They generally have two levels. One is at the 100-year level. Obviously, those would be a little more frequent, and then the 500-year level which obviously should be very infrequent.

We happened to experience that one-in-500-year flood when Superstorm Sandy came through. You know, it wasn't really a sort of traditional flood of rising waters, but it was a storm surge that pushed up the Hudson into southern Manhattan and onto our site, as well as some of the other neighborhoods.

While it had been designed appropriately by Renzo, in terms of getting it above that 500-year flood level, which has since been raised by FEMA. That was wrong. We had taken on, it was estimated, something like six and a half million gallons of water. Obviously, it wasn't high enough.

We quickly decided that we needed, obviously, to deal with this and we literally searched the world for a firm that had expertise in this, and we settled on this firm out of Hamburg, Germany. This institute had these enormous simulation tanks that could replicate waves washing ashore or washing over a building and really state-of-the-art stuff. The buildings that have this design where the ground floor just blows out essentially with the force of the water, and it's designed to do that so that the water can pass through that, so it's actually how our lobby is designed.

Those windows have a certain tolerance in terms of the amount of pound feet of pressure they can take before they might actually burst or collapse, but if that were to happen, then, yes, the water was designed to flow through the lobby, and the lobby was designed to have minimal damage occur if that were to happen.

Then the task turned to how do we better protect the site. Around the perimeter of the site, west, south and east, that's where we have the StopLog system, the aluminum log system. That seemed like the most effective and efficient way to keep the water out. In the event of a flood, tons of water could be sitting above the basement but being held in abeyance by the wall, so it's not getting into the building, but it's pushing down what's essentially the roof of the basement.

The engineers had to take into account the force of the water pushing against it, and then finally we had to contemplate that a boat or a semi-truck floating down the river might crash into this wall. The possibility of small boats or ships running into it, so it had to be very beefy from that point of view.

That's really the essence of it. It was the design of this temporary system that could be deployed as needed. We were able to arrange a space right next door in the meat packing to store that system, so that made everyone feel better.

Deployed it the first time. We actually filmed them doing that, so that those that followed would have a video instruction manual, if you will, as to how the logs went up, as well as documented in writing. Our thought was to try to deploy it once a year just so that people continue to have the practice and knowledge of how to do that. There's always turnover. You want that knowledge to pass on.

It was so cleverly designed, with each log specifically marked as to where it should go, that it was almost impossible to do it wrong, unless we misread a log. So that, in essence, has been the protocol. It can be put up by, generally, just our staff. Interestingly, the lead group that puts it up is from our art handling group, and they're used to handling large objects as well, so it's the perfect group to put up such a system. It's just a lot of lifting and setting, and nothing that's too technically difficult. You just need the bodies. It's a beautifully designed system.

The other aspect of this site, of course, as any building, it settles over time. That's why the vertical posts that get bolted down are infinitely adjustable to deal with the changing levels of that lobby over time.

Most of our art is really on the fifth floor and above so that's something like 65 feet above the street level. What I can say is our temporary wall was designed to the height where if water were to top over that, then the water's at such a level the whole city's gone at that point.