New renderings accompany announcement
New Museum's OMA Expansion to Open in the Fall
The New Museum has announced it will reopen its expanded home on Manhattan's Bowery in fall 2025. The expansion, designed by OMA partners Rem Koolhaas and Shohei Shigematsu, links to the museum's iconic 2007 building designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA.
Today's announcement comes nine years after the New Museum first announced its intention to expand its Bowery building — the museum's first purpose-built building, following a temporary space on Hudson Street when the museum was founded in 1977, and a rental space in a building in SoHo from 1983 onwards. Following the 2016 announcement, the museum shortlisted five firms to design the expansion (OMA, SANAA, Selldorf Architects, SO–IL, and WHY), selected OMA in fall 2017, and revealed the Koolhaas/Shigematsu design in 2019. Although the exterior rendering, above, gives the impression that the OMA addition is smaller than SANAA's taller “bento box,” it will basically double the museum's exhibition space to just over 20,000 square feet (1,858 m2). OMA is working on the expansion with Cooper Robertson.
In addition to the three gallery floors seamlessly linking to the galleries in the existing building, the seven-story addition will have a 74-seat Forum on one of its upper floors, as well as one floor dedicated to NEW INC, the museum's cultural incubator that was previously housed in the old New Museum-owned building that was torn down to make way for the expansion. A multipurpose room on the seventh floor will link up with the museum's existing Sky Room, doubling that space and adding terraces for more views of the Bowery, SoHo, and other parts of Lower Manhattan. On the ground floor, the lobby and bookstore will grow, a full-service restaurant will be added, and the expansion's sloping front wall will create an entrance plaza that will double as a venue for artists.
“The New Museum is an incubator for new cultural perspectives and production, and the expansion aims to embody that attitude of openness. Imagined as a highly connected yet distinct counterpart to the existing museum’s verticality and solidity, the new building will offer horizontally expansive galleries for curatorial variety, open vertical circulation, and a diversity of spaces for gathering, exchange, and creation. The building is further shaped to create an active public face—including an outdoor plaza at the ground, moments of transparency throughout the central atrium, and terraced openings at the top—that will openly engage the surrounding community and beyond.”
Key to OMA's design of the new New Museum is situating the elevators and fire stair at the rear of the building and placing an atrium stair at the front of the building, looking onto the Bowery and Prince Street through slices of glass in the metal facade. Not only is this a departure from the SANAA building, where the elevators are central, the stairs are tucked out of sight, and the galleries are hidden behind a skin of metal mesh, the new atrium, like the plaza, is intended to also function as a venue for site-specific art installations, as seen in the above rendering. The expansion, which will be named for the late Toby Devan Lewis, a museum trustee who gave $30 million toward the $125 million project, will open in the fall with the exhibition New Humans: Memories of the Future spanning the whole museum, and with “multiple site-specific commissions enabled by new architectural spaces.”
