< img src= "https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/ece/665/df200249d4a8b6c660ce6cc8a1c471bd75-newmuseumaddition-lede.rvertical.w570.jpg"width ="570 "height
=” 712 “/ > Image: Courtesy New Museum. Image: Jason O’Rear In New York City, the fresh ripens into the antique at powerful speed. Sanaa’s New Museum opened on Bowery in 2007, and under a years later on, it already required more area. After several delays and a two-year closure, the museum is reopening with a redesign by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. It’s a work of radical regard, honoring the idiosyncrasies of the original while letting it breathe. Sanaa’s principals, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, might possibly have actually blended sensations about seeing their formerly non-traditional production so adoringly secured and at the same time changed, as if it were 200 years old rather of 19. However the general public unambiguously advantages.
The museum’s first purpose-built home looked like a factory for making dreams, a difficult and abundant stack of metal-clad boxes so intent on artistic labor that it didn’t even have the time to align itself out. Squeezed into a tight lot, it enjoyed the drama of verticality. The galleries got smaller sized and the ceilings loftier as you climbed, so the 27-foot-high fourth-floor gallery felt grand but constrained, as if it had actually outgrown its container. A long, narrow stairs at the back connected galleries and passed a secret sculpture niche– a rejection of the normal grand lobbies and ceremonial staircases. It was, rather, the institutional equivalent of a speakeasy: Psst, come see some art.
Now the museum has expanded sideways, growing a different but connected neighbor. OMA’s addition has a split personality: a crystal fragment on the street, effortlessly sturdy galleries at the back. As you stroll east down Prince Street where it dead-ends at Bowery, the new structure seems leaning against the off-kilter tower. The precarious dance echoes Frank Gehry’s sinuous “Fred and Ginger” Structure in Prague, just with straight edges, sharp corners, and angled elements rather of continuous curves. Gehry and his collaborator, Vlado Milunic, designed those paired structures together; here, the younger partner provides its buddy a shot of rejuvenating playfulness.
The New Museum, with the Sanaa original on the left and OMA’s addition on the right, gives Prince Street a dramatic terminus at Bowery. Photo: Courtesy New Museum. Picture: Jason Keen
The new addition leans into the 2007 building for a kiss, then pulls away once again at the top, answering Sanaa’s cubes with OMA’s triangles. Photo: Courtesy New Museum.
Picture: Jason O’Rear The lean is an impression created by the street wall folding back to open up a plaza for outside sculpture. (The very first commission, by Sarah Lucas, will be installed later on this spring.) Behind the taut skin, a showy staircase curls up through the atrium, and from the street, the angled railings resemble tilting floorings. The structure jobs phenomenon and deference at the exact same time, keeping its distance at the bottom, coming in for a kiss upstairs, and after that pulling flirtatiously away once again at the top. The message is vintage OMA: Take a look at me taking a look at you.
The company, co-founded by Rem Koolhaas and led in New york city by one of his partners, Shohei Shigematsu, continues that play of personalities inside your home. As you climb up the staircase, you can see through the addition’s glass walls how completely the boxy forms and rasplike surface of the original have embedded themselves into the streetscape. The old style infiltrates the new one, too: Sanaa’s industrial-gauge steel mesh weakens to a practically unnoticeable steel netting sandwiched between panes of glass, giving OMA’s façade a hazy shimmer. Art work burrow into the architecture. The museum has commissioned a hanging garden of artificial moss by Klára Hosnedlová that drops through the staircase’s central void. On the second floor, as part of “New People: Memories of the Future,” the complex’s inaugural exhibit, Tishan Hsu has papered the landing wall with a woozy topography of fleshlike pixels and strange close-ups of human orifices (primarily noses and ears, I think?).
Klára Hosnedlová’s four-story-high Shelter hangs in the center of the circling around staircase. Picture: Courtesy New Museum. Picture: Jason O’Rear
Get out of the light-filled atrium and into the windowless galleries, and the tension between brand-new and sort of old disappears. The addition doubles the gallery area (to 20,000 square feet), but the only indication you’re passing from one building to the other is an extra-thick wall. That sleight of hand allows curators to divide each flooring in numerous ways and decide how continuous, or not, an exhibit needs to be. All the spaces have the exact same corrugated metal ceilings resting on white steel beams, the same concrete floors. Storage facility chic was currently a contemporary-art gallery cliché 20 years ago, however OMA was sensible not to require an upgrade on a design that clearly rejected sleekness.
Sanaa put together boxes of various sizes, so OMA did the exact same in reverse: The bigger the old gallery, the smaller its added companion. That tight, extra-tall room on the 4th flooring now streams into a long, open ballroom. It’s the kind of neutral play area that curators covet, and Massimiliano Gioni and his group understand how to utilize the space. Step out of the elevator, and you’re in a hall occupied by robots and automatons squawking, wiggling, and hanging over a doorway as if each had actually suffered a various malfunction en path to world supremacy. Here, too, what was when pioneering and portentous already looks charming. A couple of oversize flying jellyfish sculptures by Anicka Yi twirl around the gallery, up near the ceiling, in an automated aerial waltz.
The high-ceilinged fourth-floor gallery is occupied by a selection of fantastical robots. Picture: Courtesy New Museum. Picture: Jason Keen/
The 2007 structure emerged as a maker for expressing mankind through art; the resuming program endeavors into the border zone where individual meets machine. “New Human beings” broadens into every readily available square inch with astonishing timing. Out in the implausible real world, desert server farms scan human knowledge to repackage it into easily digestible responses, self-guided drones blast away muscle and bone, and algorithms embedded in listening devices determine what the world seems like. Inside this structure, generations of artists a century apart converse about likewise stressful and awe-inducing encounters between us and our technological productions.
OMA’s blue-hued public auditorium is tucked into the brand-new tower’s peak. Image: Courtesy New Museum. Picture: Jason O’Rear The New Museum is an exceptionally metropolitan person, eccentrically embedded on its once legendarily disheveled street. Koolhaas sang the delights of juxtapositions in his 1978 book Delirious New york city, and here his company has cultivated a distinctly New york city– y jangle of forms in which the utilitarian ends up being the theatrical. The structure included a few bathrooms in addition to the galleries, and they may assist, but I believe there will be lines to see the narrow sliver of a washroom with its cathedral ceiling, long yellow sink, and toilet with a Lower East Side view.
Gioni and his team have been around long enough to have seen (and assisted) the area transform, and they have actually thought of what sort of city they populate. When Yi’s jellyfish are up, they look down on an impressive range of fantasies: drawings from Hugh Ferriss’s darkly imaginative 1929 book The Metropolitan area of Tomorrow; every page of Hariton Pushwagner’s Soft City, the late-1960s graphic novel that narrates a day in the life of a generic family in a Corbusian problem of highways and high-rises; Bodys Isek Kingelez’s imaginary tropical megalopolis constructed from paper; Constant Nieuwenhuys’s 1950s designs of elaborately mysterious structures hovering over multilayered landscapes.
Anicka Yi’s jellyfish drones overfly Bodys Isek Kingelez’s paper Ghost Town. Image: Exhibition view: New Humans: Memories of the Future, 2026. New Museum, New York. Courtesy New Museum. Image: Dario Lasagni
OMA nearly appears to have anticipated that selection of unbelievable places, crowning the structure with a collection of spaces that look imaginary however aren’t: a digital fabrication lab jammed with the latest in imaginative robotics, an imagine an artist’s studio. Above the galleries, where the brand-new towerlet leans back and tilts its face to the sun, the company has built a three-dimensional puzzle out of triangular pieces. A steeply raked, blue-tinted auditorium waterfalls to a three-cornered window, so you can rest on the actions and feel as if you’re parachuting onto the Bowery. The high magenta walls of an outside terrace drop down and meet at a lookout point, producing an elevated cloister similar to Luis Barragán.
Up there, far from the public’s eye, artists will work and meet and make and teach. But rather of dealing with those spaces as back of house, OMA loaded them into the peak of a short skyscraper, elevating them into sunlit incubators of deliberate delirium poised above the everyday.
< img data-src="https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/9b0/10c/29fee4c1b421d6a5070ddd952f5ad18117-magenta-terrace.rvertical.w570.jpg" width="570" height="712" src="https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/9b0/10c/29fee4c1b421d6a5070ddd952f5ad18117-magenta-terrace.rvertical.w570.jpg"/ > A magenta-walled triangular terrace aims the eye at the World Trade Center. Image: Courtesy New Museum. Picture: Jason O’Rear