New York City hosts countless museums across its five boroughs, but the New Museum in Manhattan—dedicated exclusively to contemporary art—has become a focal point as it nears the fall opening of a 60,000-square-foot expansion. Designed by OMA with Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas in collaboration with Cooper Robertson, the expansion will significantly increase the museum’s capacity and public offerings.
© Courtesy of OMA / bloomimagesde
Founded in 1977 in a temporary Hudson Street space, the New Museum has grown into a center for new art and ideas. The OMA expansion complements the museum’s existing SANAA-designed building on the Bowery and roughly doubles gallery space. The project also improves visitor circulation by adding three new elevators, an atrium stair, and an entrance plaza. New facilities will include dedicated spaces for artist residencies, expanded public programming, and a permanent home for NEW INC, the museum’s cultural incubator.
“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,” said Lisa Phillips, Toby Devan Lewis director, New Museum. “We are thrilled to be working with Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas on OMA’s first public building in New York City, ushering in a new era of possibilities for the New Museum as a vital civic resource for New Yorkers and the global arts community.”
© Courtesy of OMA / bloomimagesde
The new building will be named for the late Toby Devan Lewis, a longtime trustee and philanthropist whose $30 million gift is the largest in the museum’s history. While the expansion will present a distinct exterior, its interior will be integrated with the existing structure. The seven-story addition aligns ceiling heights on the second, third, and fourth floors to create uninterrupted connections between buildings and improve the visitor experience with enhanced vertical circulation and neighborhood-facing views from the atrium stair.
© Courtesy of OMA
At street level, the expanded lobby will house a larger bookstore and a full-service restaurant led by chef Julia Sherman, author of Salad for President: A Cookbook Inspired by Artists. This will mark OMA and Shohei Shigematsu’s first full-service restaurant project in the United States. The 100-seat, all-day café and restaurant will pursue zero-waste practices and emphasize vegetables and local seafood, drawing on producers from the Hudson Valley and nearby purveyors.
The museum’s seventh-floor Sky Room will double in size while retaining panoramic views of downtown Manhattan, and the expansion adds three upper-floor terraces overlooking the Bowery. For the exterior finish, laminated glass with metal mesh will create a unified façade that references the SANAA building’s aesthetic while offering greater transparency.
© Courtesy of OMA / bloomimagesde
The inaugural exhibition across the expanded museum, titled New Human, will present a diagonal history of the 20th and 21st centuries through works by more than 150 international artists, writers, scientists, architects, and filmmakers. New Human explores moments when technological and social change reshaped ideas of humanity and imagined new futures. Major support for the exhibition comes from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Alongside New Human, the reopening will feature multiple site-specific commissions that take advantage of the new architecture. One highlight is VENUS VICTORIA, a new work by Sarah Lucas, commissioned as the first recipient of the Hostetler/Wrigley Sculpture Award. This biennial juried prize supports the creation and exhibition of new work by women artists on the museum’s public entrance plaza.