It’s been a decade since the New Museum announced that it would be expanding its SANAA-designed building on Manhattan’s Bowery. Now, the project – which is set to double the museum’s exhibition space thanks to a 60,000 sq ft extension designed by OMA – finally has an opening date. The contemporary art museum today announced that it will reopen to the public on 21 March 2026.

‘[The] building on the Bowery signals our redoubled commitment to new art and new ideas, and to the museum as an ever-evolving site for risk-taking, collaboration, and experimentation,’ museum director Lisa Phillips said in a statement.

The New Museum’s OMA expansion gears up for its launch

The OMA expansion, helmed by Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas, designed in collaboration with Corgan (formerly Cooper Robertson), will feature new galleries, a reimagined entrance plaza and new flexible programming space, including studios for artists in residence. The addition will also expand the lobby, which in addition to a larger bookstore and museum shop, will include an art-filled restaurant designed by Shigematsu and operated by the Oberon Group.

Crucially, the redesign will address what was considered by many to be the SANAA building’s Achille’s heel: its confusing and clunky circulation. Before, the museum floors were accessed via a single freight elevator and an ancillary hidden staircase. The OMA addition aims to introduce ‘fluid’ movement throughout the building, via three additional elevators and a stairway in the atrium.

‘I am honoured to be awarded this project in the city perhaps most central to OMA’s philosophy, and am thrilled to work with an institution that deeply values the practices of creative forward-thinkers,’ Shigematsu commented in 2017, when OMA was announced as the selected design team. ‘As a Japanese architect, I am very happy to engage in a unique dialogue with SANAA and build alongside one of their seminal works.’

The completed New Museum will be the only building in the world combining the work of two living Pritzker prize-winning architects. It will open with a survey exhibition; new commissions by artists including Tschabalala Self, Wallpaper* Design Awards 2026 winner Klára Hosnedlová and Sarah Lucas; and offer free admission during its opening weekend.

Transparent, fluid, light, fragmented, connected: a tumbling flow of eight vast cubical volumes appears to hover above a green park, sunlight and wind filtering freely through mesh façades. However, perhaps even more remarkable than this new structure’s monumental scale, weightless presence and abstraction of form is its function: it’s an art museum – and it’s also a library.

The idea of mixing two established institutions to create a paradigm-shifting new cultural concept lies at the heart of Taichung Green Museumbrary in Taiwan, designed by Japanese architects SANAA. A spatial dialogue connecting books and art, the hybrid ‘museumbrary’, which opens in December 2025, dissolves conventional boundaries and softly integrates Taichung Art Museum with Taichung Public Library.

Tour the new Taichung Green Museumbrary

SANAA’s largest cultural project to date, it spans eight cubed volumes gently raised off the ground, all interconnected in unexpected ways, creating a spatial harmony of circles, lines, curves, corners, spirals, pathways, voids and shaded plazas. Home to five art galleries, airy expanses of library floors and layered reading zones, plus more than a million physical and digital book resources, the lightly fragmented architectural form dissolves the edges between inside and out, architecture and nature, museum and library.

For SANAA’s founders Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, the 12-year-long project is anchored in the idea of creating a transformative cultural complex immersed in its natural setting. Speaking to us on site ahead of the opening, Sejima explains: ‘People can encounter new art and new books and have two different kinds of information, new experiences, new learning. These two programmes stand independently, softly – but at the same time, there are many possibilities to meet and mix them both.’

Nishizawa adds, ‘When I was a kid, when I went to the library to select a book, there was no space. Then, when I went to a museum, I saw real things, but there was no knowledge behind them. But what if a library has space and a museum also allowed kids to learn? We thought it would be nice to have a museum and a library; we always try to explore new functions that respond to our time. A museum can become a school; a café and a restaurant can be together; part of a supermarket can become a community centre. This is our way of thinking. A continuation from the past – but there must be something new.’

Approaching Taichung Green Museumbrary, a sense of transparency is immediately evoked by the volumes’ dual-layer façades, with inner glass and metal cladding wrapped in a connective flow of aluminium expanded metal mesh, filtering sun and wind. Explaining how the concept evolved from soft spheres to cubes, Nishizawa says, ‘Some are big. Some are small. Inside, there is freedom. People can explore. There is mutual interaction between boxes.’

The structures are linked by multiple access routes and shaded concrete plazas that gently undulate like rolling hills, dissolving the threshold with its setting in the 67-hectare Central Park. ‘We wanted to open up and make a space that builds a relationship with the park,’ says Sejima. ‘It’s a very public space, which is defined by how it will be used by everyone.’

Inside, a jigsaw of steel curves, internal windows, coiled walkways and clean-lined bridges shifts into focus. The main lobby is a light-flooded space with a low circular pond, temple-like stones at its base, while the art museum’s 27m-high entrance (Taiwan’s tallest art exhibition space) is anchored by a spiralling slope leading to five galleries, in the middle of which cascades a light-filtering artwork by South Korean artist Haegue Yang. Galleries vary in size and texture – one has soaring 9m-high ceilings and a polished concrete floor; another has a lantern-like ceiling wrapped in fibreglass fabric, softly diffusing both natural and artificial light.

The hybrid cultural concept aims to be a catalyst for curatorial innovation, as reflected in its inaugural show, ‘A Call of All Beings: See you tomorrow, same time, same place’ (from 13 December 2025 – 12 April 2026). Site-reactive works include Belgian artist Adrien Tirtiaux’s disruptive vertical intervention, which cuts through two layers of galleries. Library spaces are no less connective: cloud-like ceiling panels, Arne Jacobsen chairs and, at the seventh-floor apex, low-lying bookshelves to maximise the sweeping views.

The Culture Forest roof garden is another highlight, with a circular concrete pathway wrapped in glass flowing around pots of sweet osmanthus, surrounded by park and city, skies visible through mesh. There are hints of Taiwan throughout the design, a collaboration with Taipei-based Ricky Liu & Associates. This can be seen in the presence of its expansive shading areas on the ground floor, providing respite from the sun, an architectural hallmark in Taiwan.

Transparency, flow and freedom are defining qualities that ultimately connect both books and art. As Nishizawa says, ‘In Japan, transparency and movement are very important. We have religion, we have nature. There is no one centre. Nature is really dynamic: we have typhoons, earthquakes, tsunamis – there is always something happening. We have a feeling that we’re living together with nature, and we’re always moving. Nothing stays the same.’

Highlighting how this shapes the space, he says, ‘Curves mean a continuation. There is a diversity of circulation and connections inside, to allow people to walk from one pavilion to another. Each space has a feeling of freedom.’ For Taichung Museum of Art director Yi-Hsin Nicole Lai, this sense of freedom permeates the project: ‘Through the spirit of openness and integration, the museum seeks to inspire new ways of seeing and thinking, build connections between people and the city, art and nature – and become a place that sparks dialogue and reflection.’

And ultimately, it all comes back to the park – and the dynamic between humans, architecture and nature. ‘A park doesn’t define its aim or function – everyone can react or find their own way to spend their time and enjoy themselves,’ says Sejima. ‘But at the same time, you can always feel the presence of people and make space together, naturally. This is, for me, very important. I want to make architecture like this kind of space.’

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SANAA has been revealed as the winner of the RIBA Royal Gold Medal 2025. The collaborative practice of Japanese architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa has been leading in its field with its ethereal, user-centric designs, which can be found in their native country and across the globe. The accolade, one of architecture's highest honours internationally, is presented on behalf of His Majesty the King and has been offered to SANAA for their 'work to reshape the global design landscape, creating spaces that bring simplicity, light and elegance to the fore,' the RIBA explains in a statement.

RIBA Royal Gold Medal 2025 winner: SANAA

The studio has been honoured with the RIBA Royal Gold Medal 2025 for its expert place-making and commitment to crafting architecture that inspires connection and collaboration. The studio responded to the announcement, saying: 'We are delighted and very honoured to receive the Royal Gold Medal. We have always believed that architecture can transform and repair environments, helping us to relate to our surroundings, nature and each other.

'Throughout our careers, we have tried to make spaces that bring people together, inviting them to imagine new ways of living and learning collectively.  Architecture is always teamwork, and we are very grateful to everyone that has given us opportunities to develop these ideas over the years, and to all those people that have worked tirelessly with us to realise them. This is a very happy moment for us, thank you.'

Starting their joint practice in 1995, just a year before Wallpaper's own launch in 1996, the studio was honoured in our 20th-anniversary issue in 2016. A version of the article celebrating the work of its founders, originally published in our October 2016 edition and featuring an interview with Sejima, follows below. It highlights the studio's important contribution to the global architecture field.

SANAA: an appreciation

By the early 1990s, Kazuyo Sejima already had experience at Toyo Ito’s office, her own studio and a Young Architect of the Year award from the Japan Institute of Architects under her belt. But it was after setting up SANAA with Ryue Nishizawa in 1995 that her career really took off, upscaling to major cultural commissions which transformed the duo into an international go-to choice for mesmerizingly barely-there, ethereal architecture.

Their signature style of strong shapes and clean lines that at the same time appear flowing and delicate has helped define 21st-century Japanese architecture. It is all about the experience for SANAA, although priorities have shifted somewhat since the early days of the practice.

‘Our designs are not driven by what you can do with architecture itself, but by an interest in the way people experience space as a relationship between programme, city and surrounding landscape,’ Sejima says. ‘In the past, I would try to understand the overall character of a building’s environment and use this abstract idea to develop a design. Today, I try to create spaces that are more precisely adapted to the variable character of a neighbourhood.'

The practice has produced gems such as the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, the Rolex Learning Center, the Louvre-Lens and Grace Farms. The SANAA-designed New Museum in New York (2007) and the Zollverein School in Germany (2006) added to their international portfolio.

From there, commissions and honours poured in; from SANAA’s Serpentine Pavilion in London in 2009 and Sejima's appointment to direct the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale to their joint Pritzker Prize win in the same year, and participation in the Rolex Mentor scheme in 2012.

The latter also flagged up their interest in nurturing young talent; Sejima has been involved in teaching since the early 2000s. ‘Young people come up with new ideas constantly – and this can, of course, be exciting,’ she says. ‘But I have recently realised there are things we can imagine only as we grow older, making these relationships very effective during a design process.’

Now approaching 70 and 60 respectively, Sejima and Nishizawa show no sign of slowing down. More recent projects include La Samaritaine department store in Paris; the Hitachi City Hall in Sejima's home prefecture of Ibaraki; and the Inujima Art House Project, aimed at encouraging people to settle on the small island in the Seto Inland Sea. Their New Kagawa Sports Arena in Japan is expected to open later in 2025.

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When talking to the team behind the new Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, which opens for the academic year November 2022, the theme that keeps coming up is 'connection'. The project, created by Japanese architecture studio SANAA in collaboration with local studio HQ Architects, offers a new home for the school, moving it from its former location on the outskirts of the city, right to Jerusalem’s very heart. This, the institution’s president Adi Stern explains, is exactly what the school wanted for its new campus – and its future, in general. 

‘We dreamed of building an exceptional infrastructure for Bezalel, one that would propel it forward to the next chapter of its history. The new campus will enable us to continue to fulfil Bezalel’s vision of shaping the future of art, design, and architecture education and contribute significantly to the development of Jerusalem. Bezalel aspires to continue to train artists who strive for excellence, understand the environment in which they operate, and recognise their power and responsibility as critical and active citizens who impact culture, society, and the economy in Israel and the world. This extraordinary city campus in the heart of Jerusalem will be the perfect starting place for this educational journey,’ Stern says. 

Making SANAA’s Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design

SANAA, headed by Japanese architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, won the commission for this piece of education architecture through a competition in 2011. Yoshitaka Tanase, partner at the practice, describes what attracted the studio to the project: ‘We think the appeal of this project is that it is a very new form in this city, yet it has a sense of connection and unity with this city. We believe that this relationship will serve as a platform for the Bezalel Academy to nurture the diversity of the different departments and promote their interaction. The creativity and life of the students will spill over into the neighbourhood, energising it and, in turn, influencing the creativity of the students.'

The new building complex, named the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Campus, sits on a hill overlooking the Old City. It is also set among dense layers of Jerusalem's urban history, which the architecture team wanted to celebrate. The result was creating a building that looks a bit like a cascade of terraces, and feels open and transparent so that it can take in all the vistas and connect with the city on various levels. At the same time, this approach allows for its volume to be broken down to create a kind of a ‘village’, with friendly, smaller buildings, routes, plazas, and views carved out as a result, inside and out. 

‘The diversity within the Art Academy and its multidisciplinarity were inspirations for the design. Another major source of inspiration was the site, which slopes down to the Old City and is located in the centre of quite distinct surrounding buildings – the Museum of Underground Prisoners, a Russian church, Jerusalem City Hall. However, the size of this site was not large enough for the programme that was required. Another challenge was to fit this large programme into the site while ensuring the quality of the academic spaces, such as natural light and ventilation,' Tanase says. 

Materiality also played a key role in connecting the building to its context, as the team followed local planning regulations around material use, and created a concrete mix that uses local stone aggregates. ‘We did dozens of mock-ups in order to find the right mix and colour,’ HQ Architects’ founder, Jerusalem-born Erez Ella, recalls. ‘We also showed that this building is very Jerusalem in the way it’s built, it has little alleys, many different vistas. We wanted to show that we can make it feel of its place, without being too literal about it.'

Inside, the thread of connectivity continues, as Stern explains that establishing a building that allows interdisciplinary encounters and cross-pollination was crucial for the new home. 'Transparency was important from three different angles. It's about combining the indoors and outdoors in the way SANAA always does, so you’re inside and most of the time you feel like you’re outside; it's also about the community, and here the passersby can view through and see inside, walk around, see what an art school is like; and we also want to encourage our students to look out too, and remember where we are, and create things that have some connection to the Middle East, Israel, Jerusalem, ultimately, to create a sense of place.’

‘You can look through the building and out, as well as connect between the many departments,' says Ella, highlighting the rich mix of undergraduate and postgraduate courses to be housed in the new Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Campus. ‘So in a way, it’s a very modest building, blending with the environment, but it is also creating these unique conditions for education.'

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While Australia’s other major cities – Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide – bring together buildings for the arts in dedicated precincts that spatially declare their commitment to culture, Sydney’s such landmarks are scattered across the city. Among them is the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2021, and sits adjacent to the Domain, a park that edges the central business district and the Royal Botanic Gardens. The area has special significance for the Gadigal, the First Peoples who lived and conducted cultural ceremonies there for tens of thousands of years. 

In the late 19th century, architect Walter Vernon was instructed to design an art gallery in the colonial image that was ‘as strictly classical as possible’. The grand sandstone building, inspired by the Scottish National Gallery, encased an earlier brick ‘art barn’ and was constructed in stages between 1896 and 1909. In the past 50 years, the building has seen several elegant modernist extensions, and in 1994, for the first time, included a dedicated gallery for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art, albeit on the lowest level. The Art Gallery’s newest building project, Sydney Modern, is, in the words of director Michael Brand, ‘a transformation and expansion’, adding a new wing and extensive landscaping, while updating the old structure. 

In 2013, Japanese architecture practice SANAA won the international competition for the new building, its second win in the city after a 1997 design for a new cinematheque for the Museum of Contemporary Art at Circular Quay (the first collaboration between Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa) failed to go ahead. Fortunately, Sydney Modern, with A$244m in state funding supported by a further A$100m in private money, is confirmed to open its doors this December. 

Brand admits that it was a challenge to create an appropriate building for the spectacular site. SANAA’s solution is a series of spaces that link art and views, inside and out, celebrating vertical and horizontal movement through and across the site. ‘It is a building that breathes with the city, the parkland and the beautiful harbour,’ Sejima says. Visitors will enter via a glass box from an art garden between the old and new buildings. The eye is drawn across the space to varying views, from the glistening city skyline to lush trees and the harbour’s converted wharfs. ‘The atmosphere changes as the sun rises and sets, or with the activities of visitors and commuters alike,’ Sejima adds. 

As with many SANAA projects, the floor gently undulates – sloping upwards towards the shop to the side and across to the lifts and a bridge to an outside terrace. On this prominent entry level, in its rightful place, is a gallery for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art in the first of three limestone-clad boxes, with a new installation featuring narrbong-galang bags in found steel by Wiradjuri artist Lorraine Connelly-Northey. This sits next to a large window overlooking the Art Garden with a new commission by Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi artist Jonathan Jones. 

The vista downwards from the entrance level reveals cascading floors below, with two further enclosed galleries and generous public spaces, cafés, sculpture courts and education rooms. Beneath all, unseen and unexpected, is a large Second World War naval oil tank containing a dense sea of 7m-high columns, a space that instantly excites the imagination. The inaugural commission here will be by Argentinian artist Adrián Villar Rojas.

Brand describes a fruitful two-year-long process, where ‘SANAA’s design was influencing our thinking about what we might do when it’s open, but also our thinking was inspiring the way they were designing’. A section of the column-free contemporary exhibition space will house an epic version of Archive of Mind by Korean artist Kimsooja, where audiences can meditatively shape clay while taking in a spectacular view of the gardens. Similar connections between art, spaces and landscape occur throughout, with a series of site-specific commissions. New curatorial positions in film, performance and music further open up possibilities for innovative programming. 

SANAA’s ethereal glass architecture often seems to float in the landscape, so this building, dug into the side of the escarpment, may come as a surprise. Roofs on slender columns hover over limestone-clad galleries while vast textural rammed-earth walls are built into the stepping site, evocative of Sydney sandstone, one of the city’s building blocks. Here, SANAA’s work complements the material palette and feel of the original building.

As Brand says, the new expansion ‘is more than just a treasure house with collections’. It celebrates the value of art on a civic scale and promises to be a delight to explore, by offering new perspectives of the city and its architecture, as well as the artworks themselves. The building has a generous public spirit that calls on the art gallery’s curatorial and management team to create bold, inclusive programming to match. 

INFORMATION

Sydney Modern opens to the public on 3 December 2022

artgallery.nsw.gov.au

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A version of this article headlines the November 2022 Art Special Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.