Having decided to build a 200,000-square-foot facility at the entrance to the High Line in Manhattan’s meatpacking district, the Whitney Museum of American Art is embarking on internal discussions about the best way to divide its program between its downtown and uptown locations, the museum’s director, Adam Weinberg, said yesterday.

While acknowledging that the cost of operating two sites would be substantial, Mr. Weinberg said the possibility of selling the 1966 Marcel Breuer building at Madison Avenue and East 75th Street was not on the table, at least for now. “Our sincere hope is to run a twosite museum,” Mr. Weinberg said. “Can I say that it will never happen? No. But the Breuer building is an iconic building, and it has to a degree a different constituency.”

The internal discussions, which Mr. Weinberg expects to last into the spring, will address large questions about the museum’s place in the local, national, and international museum ecology, as well as ones about its audiences and its relationship to the artist community, Mr. Weinberg said. He declined to be more specific. “It’s like the personal things between you and your partner that you talk about late at night,”he said.”You don’t want to make it more public until you’ve had a chance to have those private conversations.”

He said the museum probably would not have public discussions about its programmatic and expansion plans, although it might selectively invite artists, scholars, or critics to offer their thoughts. “We have a pretty good sense of who we are and what we need to do,” Mr. Weinberg said. “That’s not to say that other people don’t have some good ideas, but we spend a lot of time thinking about it, and there’s a lot of gray matter in this institution. Donna De Salvo, who is our chief curator, is a key person.”

While the downtown facility, which will be at the corner of Gansevoort and Washington streets, will allow the space for large-scale contemporary artwork, Mr. Weinberg said he also expects it to house much of the permanent collection. “That is where probably we’ll end up having a major display of the collection,” he said. Noting that the Breuer building was built primarily to showcase mid-20th-century art, Mr. Weinberg said the new building would be designed with spaces to show both contemporary art and art of the early part of the 20th century. (The Whitney has, for instance, a large collection of Edward Hopper’s work.) It will also include a theater, for performing arts and film and media programs, as well as new education spaces and study spaces.

Asked whether, with the major part of the collection downtown, the uptown space is destined to become the “satellite” rather than the other way around, Mr. Weinberg said, “I don’t know the answer to that.” With its small floors, the Breuer building could be used for singleartist shows, he said. “I think that in a way the Breuer building will feel a little bit more like a jewel box,” he said.

He suggested that the Biennial may stay uptown. “There’s something about having the Breuer building as the container of the Biennial –– that you empty up a whole building, and you have this feeling of everything being within the building or around the building, whereas if you went to a larger space it would only be a portion of it,” he said.

“And there’s something kind of great with playing against type. People would naturally think, Oh, of course you’ll do the Biennial downtown. But that’s not necessarily the case.”

Once the program decisions are made, the museum will present them to the architect, Renzo Piano. When he has completed the design, the museum will begin the process of review by the local community board, the borough president, the City Planning Commission, and the City Council.

How much of a budget increase operating two spaces means will also become clearer after the program decisions are made. The Whitney’s current operating budget is around $26 million. “We know it is definitely more expensive to run two [facilities] than one,”Mr. Weinberg said,”which is why it was better to expand here. It’s always better to have a single site, not only for expense, but for program –– it’s better to keep it in one place.” With two facilities, he said, “you do have a lot of doubling up. [But] until we model a program, we can’t really model the budget.”

In spite of this, Mr. Weinberg said, the museum wants to hold onto the Breuer building, both because of its iconic architecture and to keep the uptown audience. “It’s a wonderful building,” he said. “I think it’s one of the great art spaces in New York. That, to me, is number one. And we also recognizing that the audiences are not identical. You have people who are uptown who will go downtown, but maybe not as much.”

The museum faced a significant degree of local opposition to its original planned expansion uptown, which called for the addition of a nine-story, stainless-steel-clad tower designed by Mr. Piano. As of now, the museum has not determined what it will do with five townhouses it owns adjacent to the Breuer building, one of which was to be demolished and the others of which were to be reduced in depth to accommodate the Piano addition. The museum vacated offices in those buildings several months ago to prepare for necessary renovations, the museum’s spokeswoman, Jan Rothschild, said.

The co-chairwoman of the Defenders of the Historic Upper East Side, a group that was vociferous in its opposition to the museum’s plan, Elizabeth Ashby, said her concerns would not be fully laid to rest until the variances the museum was granted by the city’s Board of Standards and Appeals were “dead and buried.”

‘I’m sure they don’t have the money to do both [a downtown facility and an uptown expansion],” she said. “But who knows what use they will make of this? This remains a concern.”

The museum is, in fact, planning significant renovations to the Breuer building, but the exact nature, the extent, and the timing of these have not been determined. “We have to prioritize what we need to do and then we need to phase it as well,” Mr. Weinberg said. “We obviously are not going to close the Breuer building while we’re under construction, and we’re not going to close it right after we open. But there will be substantial renovation, from both a mechanical and an aesthetic level that will occur over a period of years.”