NYC’s The New Museum declares an OMA-designed extension

Final week, the New Museum, a Manhattan hub for brand spanking new artwork and concepts, introduced that it’s going to open a 60,000 sq ft enlargement in autumn of this yr. The constructing has been designed by worldwide structure corporations OMA (the Workplace for Metropolitan Structure) and Cooper Robertson, and its opening will coincide with an inaugural exhibition known as New People: Recollections of the Future.

The New Museum initially opened in 1977 on New York’s Hudson Road; it has since moved and expanded, changing into a famend area for modern artwork. OMA founder Rem Koolhas and accomplice Shohei Shigematsu are among the many architects to work on the extension, the apply’s first public constructing in New York, which might be named after the late philanthropist Toby Devan Lewis, a long-serving New Museum trustee. It’ll ‘usher in a brand new period of potentialities for the New Museum as an important civic useful resource for New Yorkers and the worldwide arts neighborhood’, mentioned Lisa Phillips, Toby Devan Lewis director of the New Museum.

She added that ‘the New Museum has all the time been a ‘future-facing museum’ – ‘not a spot for preserving and recording historical past, however a spot the place historical past is made’. As such, the extension will complement the present constructing on the Bowery at Prince Road, which was designed by SANAA, while additionally bringing a brand new dimension, doubling the museum’s gallery area, bettering customer move, and creating new venues for artist residencies and public packages. The brand new constructing might be a ‘extremely related but distinct counterpart to the present museum’s verticality and solidity’, mentioned Shigematsu.

The OMA accomplice additionally revealed that the extension will ‘provide horizontally expansive galleries for curatorial selection, open vertical circulation, and a variety of areas for gathering, change, and creation’. It’ll embody, he mentioned, an outside plaza on the floor stage, ‘moments of transparency all through the central atrium’, and terraced openings on the high.

The inaugural exhibition might be an ‘encyclopedic, interdisciplinary exhibition that continues the Museum’s engagement with essentially the most urgent problems with as we speak’, mentioned Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson inventive director of the New Museum: ‘By the work of greater than 150 artists, writers, and cultural figures, New People reveals how our most terrifying modern considerations are actually as previous as humanity itself. [The exhibition] highlights the position artists play in decoding and confronting the crucial points that may form our collective destiny.’