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For the Truly Contemporary, a New New Museum

The 60,000-square-foot space is slated to open in late 2007.

Meaghan O'Neill -- Interior Design, 10/13/2005 12:00:00 AM

For some, everything old is new. But that’s not the case for the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. With the recent groundbreaking for its new home, the institution is just two years away from a “building whose design is commensurate with our program,” says Lisa Phillips, the museum’s Henry Luce III director.

Designed by the Tokyo-based architectural duo Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of Japan-based firm SANAA, the 60,000-square-foot, seven-story structure will be the first art museum building constructed in downtown Manhattan in more than a century. (Currently, the New Museum is housed in temporary quarters on West 22nd Street in Chelsea.) Located on what used to be a parking lot in the Bowery neighborhood, the museum, when completed, will comprise a series of stacked rectangular boxes shifted off-axis in different directions. Clad in silvery metal, the building will offer exhibition spaces, a 188-seat theater, a bookstore, classrooms, a library and study center, a café, and rooftop terraces.

Gensler will serve as executive architect on the project.

The new New Museum, the centerpiece of a $50 million capital project, is scheduled to open in late 2007, in conjunction with its 30th anniversary.

The building is one of several international, arts-related buildings designed by SANAA. Others include the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, completed last year; the Glass Pavilion of the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, which will be completed next spring; and the Institute of Modern Art of Valencia, to be completed in 2007. The firm has also won a competition to design the Louvre II, a satellite of the famous Parisian institution, which will be built in the northern French town of Lens.