Last week, the New Museum, a Manhattan hub for new art and ideas, announced that it will open a 60,000 sq ft expansion in autumn of this year. The building has been designed by international architecture firms OMA (the Office for Metropolitan Architecture) and Cooper Robertson, and its opening will coincide with an inaugural exhibition called New Humans: Memories of the Future.
The New Museum originally opened in 1977 on New York’s Hudson Street; it has since moved and expanded, becoming a renowned space for contemporary art. OMA founder Rem Koolhas and partner Shohei Shigematsu are among the architects to work on the extension, the practice's first public building in New York, which will be named after the late philanthropist Toby Devan Lewis, a long-serving New Museum trustee. It will ‘usher in a new era of possibilities for the New Museum as a vital civic resource for New Yorkers and the global arts community’, said Lisa Phillips, Toby Devan Lewis director of the New Museum.
Renderings of the expanded New Museum
She added that ‘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’. As such, the extension will complement the existing building on the Bowery at Prince Street, which was designed by SANAA, whilst also bringing a new dimension, doubling the museum’s gallery space, improving visitor flow, and creating new venues for artist residencies and public programs. The new building will be a ‘highly connected yet distinct counterpart to the existing museum’s verticality and solidity’, said Shigematsu.
The OMA partner also revealed that the extension will ‘offer horizontally expansive galleries for curatorial variety, open vertical circulation, and a diversity of spaces for gathering, exchange, and creation’. It will include, he said, an outdoor plaza at the ground level, ‘moments of transparency throughout the central atrium’, and terraced openings at the top.
Daria Martin, Soft Materials, 2004 (still), part of the New Humans exhibition
The inaugural exhibition will be an ‘encyclopedic, interdisciplinary exhibition that continues the Museum's engagement with the most pressing issues of today’, said Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson artistic director of the New Museum: ‘Through the work of more than 150 artists, writers, and cultural figures, New Humans reveals how our most terrifying contemporary concerns are in fact as old as humanity itself. [The exhibition] highlights the role artists play in interpreting and confronting the critical issues that will shape our collective fate.’
The New Museum is ‘an incubator for new cultural perspectives and production’, said Shigematsu, and we look forward to seeing OMA’s architectural interpretation of this methodology.
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