joining me renzo piano, architect, and museum director adam weinberg. pleased to have both of them here. so it's complete. after some dozen years of planning and building, how do you characterize this moment for you? >> well, the whitney has been trying to expand for 30 years. we tried to expand next to our building uptown four directors ago. the collection when we first moved in was only 2,000 works and today it's 22,000 works. the idea of being able to see not just what we have but to offer possibilities and aspirational spaces for artists to do things. >> rose: the great irony is you're going back to your roots? >>t feels comfortable. the greatest compliment we've received in the last weeks habit feels like the whitney. even though it's a very different kind of space. >> rose: hasn't there been some effort to design a new whitney building for a while? >> yes, it's been going on for decades. michael graves many years ago made an attempt. and rem coolhouse did later on. renzo did a plan for uptown which was quite a good one but, in the end, we both agr

joining me now, renzo piano, and adam weinberg. this is a remarkable story. so it is complete. w do you characterize this moment? adam: the whitney have been trying to expand for 30 years. we try to expand next to our building for the records -- four directors ago. the collection when we first moved in with 2000 works. today it is 22,000 works. the idea of being able to see not just what we have, but to offer possibilities and aspirational spaces for artists to do things like we have never been able to do before. charlie: and you're going back to your roots. adam: it feels very comfortable. the greatest complement we have received in the last weeks has been it feels like the whitney. even though it is a different kind of space. charlie: hasn't there been effort to design a new whitney building for a while? adam: for decades. michael graves many years ago made an attempt. renzo himself did a plan for uptown. in the end we both agreed there wasn't the kind of space you need to for contemporary art. charlie: leonard is a great friend of mine. i'm am sure a friend of yours. he calls

the man who coined the term was adam weinberg who was a distinguished physicist who, at the time, was the director of the lab that lawrence had founded. it was 1961 and in one and in an article in science magazine, weinberg raise some of these questions and said we were going to replace thinking with money and the universities were going to be very vulnerable to this sort of trend. he foresaw the evolution of professors and administrators into fundraisers and & rios and was very concerned about that and the need to take on projects that were amenable to publicity and journalism and to something that wasn't going to work very well with the academy. i think we have seen that process continue. when he invited invented the cyclotron he had pressure from his financial patrons. he tried to resist but he finally had to agree to do so to protect him from commercial exploitation though he reserved a free license for academic users. that really was the beginning of a long trend. she was very concerned about the trend toward patenting discoveries that really should belong to the public and he re