![]() Views of the Lobby and Fourth Floor From the Street to the Art Now we have a building that meets the city, allows natural light inside, gives the Museum column-free galleries and programmatic flexibility, and expresses the program and people inside to the world of New York outside.” Then through trial and error we arrived at the final, ideal configuration. The solution of the shifted boxes arrived quickly and intuitively. “We knew we could not maximize the entire site with solid architecture, we had to reduce the building’s mass somehow to create space between it and the perimeter. “It was complicated to organize the architecture around all of the desires,” Sejima and Nishizawa have said. With windows just visible behind this porous scrim-like surface (achieved with a common material never before employed to clad major a building façade), the structure appears as a single, coherent, and even heroic form that is nevertheless mutable, dynamic, and animated by the changing light of day-an appropriate visual metaphor for the openness of the New Museum and the ever-changing nature of contemporary art. ![]() The New Museum is clad in a seamless, anodized expanded aluminum mesh chosen by SANAA to emphasize the volumes of the boxes while dressing the whole of the building like a strong body in a delicate, filmy, softly shimmering skin. The New Museum at 235 Bowery under construction The shifted-box approach yields a variety of open, fluid, and light-filled internal spaces that are different heights at every level, with different characters but all column-free. In order to address these conditions without creating a monolithic, dark, and airless building, SANAA assigned key programmatic elements to a series of levels (the seven boxes), stacked those boxes according to the anticipated needs and circulation patterns of building users, then drew the different levels away from the vertebrae of the building core laterally to the north, south, east, or west. They arrived at a dense and ambitious program that would allow for open, flexible gallery spaces of different heights and atmospheres within a tight zoning envelope on a footprint a mere seventy-one feet wide and 112-feet deep. This distinctive form derives directly from the architects’ defining solution to fundamental challenges of their site. As visitors approach on the Bowery or from the west along Prince Street, they encounter the building as a dramatic stack of seven rectangular boxes. We were determined to make a building that felt like that.” Amidst a cluster of relatively small and mid-sized buildings of varying types and uses, the New Museum rises 175 feet above street level. The New Museum is a combination of elegant and urban. When we learned about the history of the New Museum we were flabbergasted by its attitude, which is very political, very focused on new ideas, fearless. Both have a history of being very accepting, open, embracing of every idiosyncrasy in an unprejudiced manner. In the end, the Bowery and the New Museum have a lot in common. “We were a bit shocked, but we were also impressed that a fine art museum wanted to be there. “The Bowery was very gritty when we first visited it,” they have said. Sejima and Nishizawa, who received the commission for the Museum’s current flagship building in 2002, have described the project as their response to the history and powerful personalities of both the New Museum and its storied site. The New Museum building is intended as a home for contemporary art and an incubator for new ideas, as well as an architectural contribution to New York’s urban landscape. SANAA was named one of “The World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies” by Fast Company in 2016. Street Views of the New Museum at 235 Bowery History of the New Museum at 235 Bowery To learn more about the Museum’s planned expansion, please click here. This new structure will complement and be seamlessly integrated with the Museum’s SANAA-designed flagship building while doubling our exhibition space, creating new venues for artist residencies and public programs, and establishing a permanent home for our cultural incubator NEW INC. In November 2022, the New Museum broke ground on a 60,000-square-foot expansion designed by OMA / Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas. ![]() The New Museum opened its current, seven-story building designed by Pritzker Architecture Prize-winning firm SANAA / Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa in 2007 on the Bowery at the terminus of Prince Street in New York City.
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