For nearly two decades, the New Museum has stood on the Bowery as a stack of shimmering white boxes, a vertical landmark in a neighborhood once defined by grit and now by glass. This Saturday, that iconic silhouette gains a companion. The museum will officially inaugurate its long awaited expansion, a 60,000 square foot addition designed by OMA that effectively doubles the institution’s footprint and marks a major pivot in its nearly 50 year history.
Designed by Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas in collaboration with Cooper Robertson, the new structure is less a carbon copy and more a conversational partner to the original SANAA designed building. While the 2007 flagship is known for its hermetic, opaque quality, the OMA expansion offers a more transparent and angular profile. Cloaked in laminated glass with integrated metal mesh, the building appears to “kiss” its predecessor at a central point before tapering toward a street level plaza.
“It is not simply an extension, but a complement, a counterpart,” Mr. Koolhaas said of the project. “We interpreted the commission as if there were two parts that were finally united and that would form a single entity.”
The $82 million project arrives at a moment of transition for the museum. Lisa Phillips, the Toby Devan Lewis Director who has led the institution for over 26 years, is set to step down in April. For Ms. Phillips, the expansion is the culmination of a decade of planning and a final testament to the museum’s ethos of radical openness.
“The New Museum has always been a future facing museum – not a place for preserving and recording history, but a place where history is made,” Ms. Phillips said during a recent preview. “This expansion ushers in a new era of possibilities for the New Museum as a vital civic resource.”
Inside, the architectural changes are as much about logistics as they are about aesthetics. The museum has long struggled with “bottleneck” circulation, a byproduct of its vertical design. The OMA addition solves this with three new elevators and a dramatic atrium staircase that offers views of the surrounding neighborhood while providing space for large scale commissions.
The first of these is a sprawling fiber artwork by the Czech artist Klára Hosnedlová, which tumbles down four stories within the new stairwell. Other permanent site specific works include a facade commission by Tschabalala Self and a sculpture by Sarah Lucas located in the new entry plaza.
The expansion also provides a permanent home for NEW INC, the museum’s cultural incubator for tech and design, and includes a 74 seat forum for public programs. On the ground floor, a new restaurant designed by Mr. Shigematsu and helmed by chef Julia Sherman aims to turn the museum into a social hub as much as a gallery space.
The reopening is anchored by a building wide exhibition titled “New Humans: Memories of the Future.” Curated by Massimiliano Gioni, the artistic director, the show features works by more than 200 artists, ranging from historical figures like Salvador Dalí and Francis Bacon to contemporary provocateurs like Precious Okoyomon and Hito Steyerl.
The exhibition explores how technological and social forces have reshaped the very definition of what it means to be human. In many ways, it reflects the museum’s own evolution: an institution that started in a single room on Hudson Street in 1977 and now occupies a 120,000 square foot campus on the Bowery.
“The New Museum is an incubator for new cultural perspectives,” Mr. Shigematsu said. “The expansion aims to embody that attitude of openness.”
As the doors open this weekend with free admission for the public, the “New New Museum” stands as a rare architectural dialogue between two Pritzker Prize winning firms. It is a bold bet on the continued relevance of physical art spaces in an increasingly digital world, and a final, gleaming bow for the director who helped build it.
