To anyone who has been in a relationship so intimate that it feels like two people have become one, the expanded New Museum in New York might seem familiar. With a new building designed by OMA that effectively doubles the museum’s size to 11,148 square metres, the institution has received not a separate building, nor a simple addition — it has welcomed an equal partner that makes the beloved original even better.
“Instead of designing an extension, which is another identity, another entrance or another this and that, we thought this project should be designed as a pair,” says Shohei Shigematsu, a New York–based partner of OMA, describing the delicate task of responding to the museum’s original design by SANAA. “We liberated our minds to not just deliver another new building screaming for attention but really focus on an interesting balance and a nuanced relationship.”
The SANAA building, completed in 2007, already had a commanding presence in Lower Manhattan. Composed of stacked off-kilter boxes and clad in expanded aluminum mesh, it was almost immediately accepted as an icon that seemed in sync with the gentrifying forces already shaping the historically gritty Bowery. In the years that followed, it helped anchor a renaissance of the area, as new condos, upscale shops and boutique hotels moved in. Within a decade, however, the museum was buckling under its own success as attendance numbers grew and its programming became more wide-ranging. The galleries inside seemed cramped, and circulation often felt like trying to squeeze through clogged plumbing.
OMA’s intervention resolves those issues while exhibiting surprising deference to its SANAA-designed partner (even as it undergoes construction refinements after apparently being opened in a rush, with many rough edges). Inside, new and old floors are connected so seamlessly that it would be easy to lose track of which side you’re in. Shorter and deeper than the SANAA building, OMA’s addition also takes pains to reveal its neighbour. A triangular slice of the facade pulls back from the street to create a small plaza directly in line with the end of Prince Street while also showcasing a side of SANAA’s structure that was previously hidden by a commercial neighbour. At the top, the massing angles back from the street to create a series of triangular terraces and expose the cantilevered crown of the SANAA building.
Yet OMA’s design still has its own personality. Its defining feature is a grand staircase that spirals up the front portion of the building, solving the museum’s former circulation problems and capturing views of the city as it rises. “It’s a kind of collision space, where all sorts of users and the public can hang around, meet and exchange,” says Shigematsu. For now, the space is made more dramatic with a four-storey-tall installation of flax-based textiles (Shelter) by the artist Klára Hosnedlová, which cascades down the centre of the staircase atrium.
The facade of OMA’s building is constructed using glass laminated with metal mesh. “During the day, it becomes completely solid and highly metallic” when sunlight hits the glass, says Shigematsu. “But at night, it starts to show its difference” as the glass turns transparent. The building isn’t subservient to its predecessor, nor does it overshadow it. Much like any good marriage, the two entities are distinct — but support each other.
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