The New Museum of Contemporary Art is Totally Stacked!
A sleek building rises on the cleaned-up Bowery. Winos, unite, and put a smock on!
Matthew Strmiska
November 28, 2007
By Ariel Vered
A rendering of the New Museum’s geometric façade, left.
Project: The New Museum of Contemporary Art
Director/Producer: Lisa Roumell, Deputy Director.
Team: Florian Idenburg of SANAA, the chief project architect for Tokyo-based Sejima and Nishizawa; Maddy Burke of Gensler, based in New York; and Guy Nordenson, the celebrated design engineer who worked on MoMa’s expansion. “Building a museum in New York is something few architects ever get the chance to do. It was the chance of a lifetime,” says Idenburg.
Location: Bowery and Prince Street, smack dab in the middle of New York’s most rapidly gentrifying neighborhood (art snobs with visions of restaurant supply stores and flophouses dancing in their heads can rest easy). Roumell explains the location choice: “The New Museum is about change. We picked our homes [most recently SoHo, where the Prada store now stands] in areas where we can become a catalyst of artistic forces and community and bring regeneration and rebirth to the neighborhood.”
Inside one of the stacked-glass galleries, above.
Design: Six stacked boxes atop a ground floor made entirely of glass, rendering visible everything from the café and the museum shop to the back gallery and loading area. The boxes, which pivot around a central core, each have a unique square footage, ceiling height, and floor plan. The façade is an aluminum expanded metal mesh (fun fact: the same material as many New York City garbage cans). “We wanted the building to be light and open, but a little tough because it’s on Bowery,” says Idenburg.
Motive: Ready your paintball guns, there’s a New Museum on the block! Not only is the New Museum the only New York museum devoted exclusively to contemporary art, it’s also gotten a high-profile facelift. “The same way MoMA experienced a resurgence with its new building, the New Museum will probably experience the same,” says Burke.
Mission: Allow Roumell to get poetic for a moment: “[The museum] opens up to the city, it lets arts and ideas escape back into the city. ‘New ideas’ is our mission and we were very keen on sharing that with the world.”
Posted by Toronto Condos on Sat Apr 19, 2008 at 10.16 am
The boxes, which pivot around a central core, each have a unique square footage, ceiling height, and floor plan. The façade is an aluminum expanded metal mesh (fun fact: the same material as many New York City garbage cans)