New York 08_

New York 08_

_The New Museum

235 Bowery,New York, NY 10002

www.newmuseum.org

Hours: Wed-Sat: 12-6 pm/ Mon -Tue: closed/Free Thursday Evenings (from 7 pm to 9 pm).

Architect: Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA. 2007

  

The New Museum, designed by Tokyo-based architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA with Gensler, New York, serving as Executive Architect, is a seven-story, structure located at 235 Bowery between Stanton and Rivington Streets, at the origin of Prince Street in New York City. The first art museum ever constructed from the ground up in downtown Manhattan, the New Museum opened to the public on December 1, 2007, coinciding with the institution’s 30th anniversary.

The New Museum building is a home for contemporary art and an incubator for new ideas, as well as an architectural contribution to New York’s urban landscape. Sejima and Nishizawa, who received the commission in 2002, have described the building as their response to the history and powerful personalities of both the New Museum and its storied site. “The Bowery was very gritty when we first visited it,” they have said. “We were a bit shocked, but we were also impressed that a contemporary art museum wanted to be there.”

“In the end, the Bowery and the New Museum have a lot in common. Both have a history of being very accepting, open, embracing of every idiosyncrasy in an unprejudiced manner. When we learned about the history of the New Museum we were flabbergasted by its attitude, which is very political, fearless, and very tough. The New Museum is a combination of elegant and urban. We were determined to make a building that felt like that.” 

Amidst a cluster of relatively small and midsized buildings of varying types and uses, the New Museum rises 174 feet above street level. As visitors approach the Bowery or from the west along Prince Street, they encounter the building as a dramatic stack of seven rectangular boxes. This distinctive form derives directly from the architects’ defining solution to fundamental challenges of the site: A dense and ambitious program, including the need for open, flexible gallery spaces of different heights and atmospheres, had to be accommodated within a tight zoning envelope on a footprint of seventy-one feet wide and 112 feet deep. 

In order to address these conditions without creating a monolithic, dark, and airless building, SANAA assigned key programmatic elements to a series of levels (the seven boxes), stacked those boxes according to the anticipated needs and circulation patterns of building users, then drew the different levels away from the vertebrae of the building core laterally to the north, south, east, or west. The shifted-box approach yields a variety of open, fluid internal spaces that are different heights at every level, with different characteristics but all column-free.

The New Museum is clad in a seamless, anodized expanded aluminium mesh chosen by SANAA to emphasize the volumes of the boxes while dressing the whole of the building with a delicate, filmy, softly shimmering skin. With windows just visible behind this porous scrim-like surface, the building appears as a single, coherent, and even heroic form that is nevertheless mutable, dynamic, and animated by the changing light of day—an appropriate visual metaphor for the openness of the New Museum and the ever-changing nature of contemporary art.

“A museum for contemporary art should be neutral in the character of its gallery spaces, in order to create the widest palette for the art itself,“ SANAA has stated. “With the galleries in this building, we tried to play with dimensions and the way daylight falls in the spaces. This allows the visitor to experience art in slightly different conditions on different visits, at different times of the day, in different spaces, without impeding the qualities of the art.”

In the galleries, the steel of the architecture is exposed. The diagonal structural beams of the exterior, rendered white with their spray-on fireproofing material, intumescent paint, appear at interludes. “We want the building to show what it is,” SANAA has stated. “This openness is consistent with the openness of the New Museum and the honesty of the everyday businesses along the Bowery.” The structural steel makes frequent appearances throughout the building.

Reflecting upon the completed building, five years from initial conception to completion, SANAA comments: “The new building is both part of SANAA and the New Museum. In the time that we have been together, both have changed very much. In some ways we are both bigger, more relaxed, but still always hoping to explore and find new things. The New Museum is intriguing because it is always asking questions and we hope that it continues to do so. Our building is an attempt to express the New Museum’s adventurousness and freedom.”

1F_Lobby,caffe and shop/ 2F_ Eugenio Lopez Galleries/ 3F_Maja Hoffmann/Luma Foundation Galleries/ 4F_Dakis and Lietta Joannou Galleries/ 5F_Pauline and Constantine Karpidas Education Centre/ 6F_staff offices, kitchen, restrooms, and meeting spaces / 7F_The Toby Devan Lewis Sky Room/ 8F_mechanical support / -1F_Theatre

Texto de www.newmuseum.org, imágenes de www.dezeen.com