The Whitney Museum of American Art’s new building, designed by Renzo Piano, opened to the public on 1st May in the historic Meatpacking District of Lower Manhattan. Although much has been made of the new Whitney’s debut in a neighbourhood prominent in current debates over gentrification and affordable housing in New York, its relocation is also ironically a return to the institution’s downtown roots. Established in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the Museum grew out of the Studio Club on West 8th Street. From its roots in a circle of artists including Edward Hopper and John Sloan, the Museum grew steadily throughout the twentieth century, moving uptown in the mid-1950s before occupying a Brutalist concrete structure designed by Marcel Breuer on the Upper East Side in 1966. (The Breuer building has been leased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which will begin using it in 2016 as additional exhibition space.)

Architecturally, the new Whitney lacks the bunker-like quality of the Breuer edifice, although it obliquely echoes the stepped façade of its predecessor. Piano has created a sort of amalgam of two buildings – one incorporating a stepped structure dedicated to the public spaces of the Museum, and the other devoted to offices as well as research and conservation facilities. Its strong asymmetry mitigated only slightly by a skin of glass and steel, the building’s overall presence is somewhat jarring, with no single view providing a unified sense of approach or purpose. Piano’s Whitney is a sum of excellent qualities and arresting passages that never quite resolve into a coherent architectural whole. Instead, it offers multiple satisfying micro-architectural experiences: appealing views from various outdoor terraces on upper floors; a lobby – accessible to the public at no charge – made transparent by a plentiful use of glass, providing an impression of openness to the space outside the building’s entrance; and a generous public plaza, or largo, that creates a sense of the building’s contents and inhabitants mingling with the life of the neighbourhood (this last quality very much in contrast to the introverted character of the Breuer building).

But above all, there are the galleries, some of the most satisfying spaces created for the exhibition of art in New York in many years. Piano is arguably the most prominent architect working with museums today, for the reason that he consistently creates interior spaces that allow works of art to take precedence over their architectural surroundings. While the new Whitney does not eschew its role as an architectural destination typical of ­museums in recent years, its sustaining qualities provide a spacious and sympathetic home to a permanent collection that has for a long time been too little seen.

The statistics speak for themselves – 50,000 square feet of indoor exhibition space, plus another 13,000 square feet of outdoor space, spread over the building’s tiered terraces, as well as a large theatre. All these areas are put to exemplary use in the Whitney’s inaugural installation of more than six hundred works by some four hundred artists from the Museum’s collection (which currently numbers well over twenty thousand works by three thousand artists). Titled ‘America is Hard to See’ – the line taken from a poem by Robert Frost – the Whitney’s display occupies the whole of the Museum, providing a kaleidoscopic testimonial to the aptness of Frost’s statement and a thorough ­vindication of the new building’s large size.

The primary spaces for art at the Whitney comprise its upper four floors; in the future, two of these floors will be devoted to loan exhibitions. For ‘America is Hard to See’, a curatorial team led by Chief Curator Donna De Salvo has begun the chronological journey at the top floor, working its way downwards with roughly overlapping timelines, yielding less an historical narrative than an interweaving of thematic motifs encompassing abstraction and music, the circus, the creative pulse of New York City, opposition to the Vietnam War, the AIDS epidemic and much more. Familiar collection standards by Georgia O’Keeffe, Alexander Calder, Willem de Kooning, Eva Hesse and Jasper Johns share the galleries with rarely seen gems. Among the discoveries to be made are ­Malcolm Bailey’s 1969 painting diagramming the cargo hold of a slave ship; the powerful Boat composite by Irene Rice Pereira from 1932; Howard Lester’s low-key, disturbing 1970 video One week in Vietnam; and many others. Prints, photographs and drawings are integrated into the display, albeit often in galleries to themselves, where salon-style hangings deliver a strong portion of the exhibition’s political and social content, as in one particularly powerful and disturbing wall with multiple images of lynchings.

The Whitney has long been an institution that everyone in the American art world, and New York proper, routinely criticised. Variously deemed too exclusionary of women and artists of colour, too focused on artists in New York, too politicised or not politicised enough, and too far from, or too much enmeshed in, recent developments in contemporary art, the Whitney now presents those fraught assessments as its qualifications – calling cards in the ever-increasing challenge of defining American art and, by extension, America itself. America may be hard to see, the Whitney implies, as a sweeping unitary whole, but specific, pertinent glimpses are available in abundance. Since there are many stories, and not just one, being told, the future promises as many fresh installations of the permanent collection as there are versions and visions of America. With any luck, this should restore to the permanent collection of a major museum the kind of excitement that has become too much the terrain of temporary blockbuster exhibitions.

If the strength of the Whitney’s initial presentation restores the primacy of art within the most ambitious and spectacularly ­situated new museum built in New York (or anywhere else) in years, the outsize character of its ambition, and achievement, begs a second question, which is the place of American art in the world today. At a time when the art world is increasingly global, the new Whitney comes on like an old-school first-world powerhouse. Defining itself in its inaugural brochure as ‘the world’s leading museum of twentieth-century and contemporary art of the United States’, the Whitney offers itself as winner in a contest with relatively few contestants and an ill-defined prize. What can be the role of a museum dedicated to the art of a single nation, however large and diverse, on the contemporary global stage? That such questions are on the Museum’s mind is made clear by the recent reassignment of jobs at the Museum, whereby De Salvo has been made Deputy Director for International Initiatives, a new position. The Whitney’s rise as an institution roughly paralleled the rise of the United States as a world power. Seeing how the Museum conducts itself now, in the twenty-first century, may yield the most interesting chapter of its history yet.