Explore The Breuer through a nine-stop audio guide highlighting the building’s history, architecture, and defining details. Find the audio guide transcript below:

Welcome to the Breuer Building—Marcel Breuer’s 1966 Brutalist landmark and now the home of Sotheby’s New York. After serving as the home of the Whitney Museum, The Met Breuer, and Frick Madison, the building entered its latest chapter with Sotheby’s in November 2025. To begin, step outside and face the entrance from the sidewalk.

From the sidewalk, look up at the striking silhouette. Unlike a conventional building, which narrows as it climbs towards the sky, Marcel Breuer’s revolutionary design grows wider toward the top. This dramatic form is known as a reverse ziggurat. The gallery floors stretch out as they rise above a recessed glass base, creating a cantilevered form that appears to defy gravity. Beneath a low canopy, a concrete bridge carries you across the sunken garden—originally conceived as an indoor-outdoor space for sculpture— into the building, leaving Madison Avenue behind as you enter another world.

Inside the lobby, look upward at the field of circular lights. Breuer’s original design included 375 half-chromed bulbs whose reflective surfaces send a soft glow toward the ceiling. Around you, notice the textured concrete. The material was struck with a specialized bush hammer to expose the stone within and create its rough, textured surface. The built-in furnishings further demonstrate how Breuer conceived lighting, materials, and practical objects as parts of one complete interior.

Before heading upstairs, make time for one final detail: enter the Salon on the north side and look for the clock set directly into the concrete wall. Rather than being added afterward, the circular recess for the clock was incorporated into Breuer’s original plans, making even an everyday object part of the architecture. Now, follow Breuer’s design up the stairs and make your way to the second floor.

As you climb, notice how the staircase gradually reveals the building. Dark bluestone steps contrast with teak handrails capped in blackened brass, while each landing introduces a different view of the galleries and of Madison Avenue. Breuer treated circulation as part of the visitor experience, not simply as a way to move between floors. With every turn, the stairwell alternates between enclosed concrete surfaces and changing views of the city, creating moments of compression, release, and discovery.

Pause on the landing and look above the window. This tiny clay settlement is Charles Simonds’s art installation Dwelling, created in 1981 for his imaginary Little People—an nomadic civilization dreamt up by the artist with secret outposts from New York to Amsterdam, Venice to Shanghai, and beyond. The nomads move from Dwelling to Dwelling, charting a path that anyone can follow if they know where (and how) to look. Yet by the time you find them, they’ve already decamped for the next territory.

An earlier Dwelling appeared in the 1977 Whitney Biennial — you’re now looking at the world’s longest-standing example. The majority of Simonds’s Dwellings are intentionally exposed to the elements, like birds’ nests or anthills. This vulnerability is by design. “The Dwellings are not precious,” the artist says. “I could build one again in a snap.”

Two related settlements are hidden across Madison Avenue at number 940: one beneath a second-story window and another under the chimney hood. Can you spot them?

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Breuer’s unmistakable trapezoidal windows are often called “eyelid” windows. Their angled shape gives the impression of looking out over the city. The design is practical, too: it brings controlled natural light into the galleries while shielding the art from broad, direct exposure. Instead of revealing a sweeping panorama, each window frames one carefully chosen view. This one looks onto East 75th Street. As you continue upward, notice how the view changes from window to window.

When you come to the third floor, look above you at the suspended concrete grid ceiling. Breuer designed it to accommodate adjustable lighting and channels for temporary walls, allowing the gallery to be reorganized for different exhibitions. For Sotheby’s, architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron added focused spotlights, ambient lighting, and linear fixtures fitted discreetly within the original coffers. The updated system can adapt to changing exhibitions and auctions while preserving Breuer’s original concrete grid.

The fourth floor is the Breuer’s largest and loftiest gallery, originally designed as an uninterrupted 118-foot exhibition space. Underfoot, the bluestone floor gives the room a dark, continuous foundation. Breuer treated the stone with pigmented wax, deepening its color and drawing attention to its natural texture, a detail that gives the vast gallery a surprisingly rich surface.

On this floor, you’ll find the building’s largest trapezoidal window—and the only one facing Madison Avenue—which frames a decidedly different view of the city than the smaller “eyelid” window you encountered on the second floor. Before every Marquee auction season in the spring and fall, this gallery is transformed into Sotheby’s saleroom.

It was here, on November 18, 2025, that Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer from the Leonard A. Lauder Collection sold for $236.4 million—making it the most valuable artwork ever sold by Sotheby’s, and the second-most valuable artwork ever sold at auction.

The fifth floor, a fitting finish to our tour, is a place of transformation. When the building first opened in 1966, this level included two terraces and administrative spaces. In 1998, those offices were relocated, the terraces were enclosed, and the floor became the Leonard and Evelyn Lauder Galleries.

For Sotheby’s, a pre-existing elevator and stairwell between the fifth floor and mezzanine were removed to create one continuous gallery space. If you’re facing the window, look beyond the two galleries to your left to see the newly connected area.

Across six decades, four institutions, and countless installations, Breuer’s Brutalist masterpiece has continued to evolve, without ever losing its singular architectural identity.