The New Museum, Manhattan’s only museum dedicated exclusively to contemporary art, today announced that its 60,000 sq ft building expansion designed by OMA / Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas in collaboration with Cooper Robertson will open in fall 2025.
Founded in 1977 in a temporary space on Hudson Street, the New Museum has experimented and evolved since its founding as a hub for new art and new ideas, expanding its footprint at key moments in its history to better serve artists and the public. Its OMA-designed expansion will complement the New Museum’s existing SANAA-designed flagship building on the Bowery at Prince Street while doubling the Museum’s gallery space; improving visitor flow through the addition of three elevators, an atrium stair, and an entrance plaza; creating new venues for artist residencies and public programs; and establishing a purpose-built home for the Museum’s cultural incubator NEW INC, among many other new and expanded features, marking a transformative moment for the Museum and the city.
“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 of the 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.”
“The New Museum is an incubator for new cultural perspectives and production, and the expansion aims to embody that attitude of openness,”
said Shohei Shigematsu, OMA Partner.
“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.”
The OMA building will be named in honor of the late visionary philanthropist Toby Devan Lewis, a long-serving New Museum Trustee whose $30 million contribution to the Capital Campaign is the largest gift in the Museum’s history. To date, the New Museum has raised $118 million towards its Capital Campaign goal of $125 million, with $82 million in construction costs.
About the Expanded Building
Complementing the New Museum’s existing architecture, the OMA-designed expansion will appear distinct on the outside while being seamlessly integrated on the inside. The new seven-story building will double the Museum’s gallery space, aligning ceiling heights on the second, third, and fourth floors for uninterrupted connectivity across both buildings. The OMA design will improve vertical circulation for visitors through the addition of an atrium stairway, which will offer views of the surrounding neighborhood and the opportunity for site-specific art installations, as well as three additional elevators, two of which will be dedicated to gallery access.
On the ground level, the Museum’s enlarged lobby will feature an expanded bookstore as well as a full-service restaurant, while just outside a new entrance plaza will create an open-air venue for public art installations at the terminus of Bowery and Prince Street. On the Museum’s upper floors, the new building will include a dedicated studio for artists-in-residence, a 74-seat forum, and a purpose-built home for NEW INC, the first museum-born cultural incubator, which will equip its annual cohort of 120+ creative entrepreneurs with collaborative working spaces and top-of-line production facilities.
The New Museum’s seventh floor Sky Room will double in size while retaining its panoramic views of downtown Manhattan, and the expanded building will include three additional upper-floor terraces overlooking the Bowery. On the exterior, laminated glass with metal mesh will provide a simple, unified façade by using materials that recall and complement the original SANAA building while allowing for a higher degree of transparency.
About the Inaugural Exhibition
Continuing the New Museum’s long history of presenting provocative and timely thematic exhibitions, New Humans: Memories of the Future will inaugurate the expanded building with an exploration of artists’ enduring preoccupation with what it means to be human in the face of sweeping technological changes.
Spanning the entire Museum, New Humans will trace a diagonal history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through the work of more than 150 international artists, writers, scientists, architects, and filmmakers, highlighting key moments when dramatic technological and societal changes spurred new conceptions of humanity and new visions for its possible futures. Placing new and recent works by artists including Sofia Al-Maria, Lucy Beech, Meriem Bennani, Cyprien Gaillard, Pierre Huyghe, Tau Lewis, Daria Martin, Wangechi Mutu, Precious Okoyomon, Berenice Olmedo, Philippe Parreno, Hito Steyerl, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Andro Wekua, and Anicka Yi in the context of works by twentieth century artists and cultural figures such as Francis Bacon, Constant Nieuwenhuys, Salvador Dalí, Ibrahim El-Salahi, H.R. Giger, Kiki Kogelnik, Hannah Höch, Tatsuo Ikeda, Gyula Kosice, El Lissitzky, Lennart Nilsson, Eduardo Paolozzi, Carlo Rambaldi, Germaine Richier, and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, New Humans illuminates the ways in which artists’ visions of the future have evolved throughout time. Major support for New Humans is provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
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