CONTEMPORARY MUSEUM

Contemporary museum

Contemporary museum

The new New Museum of Contemporary Art, planned by Tokyo-based architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA with Gensler, New York, serving as Executive Architect, is an eight-story, [structure] of nine floors located in 235 Bowery between Stanton and Rivington Streets, at the origin of Prince Street in New York. The first fine art museum ever built from the ground in downtown Manhattan, the new museum opened to the public coinciding with the 30th anniversary of the institution.

The new Museum building is designed as a home for contemporary art and an incubator of new ideas and an architectural contribution to the cityscape of New York. Sejima and Nishizawa, who received the Commission in 2002, described the building as their response to the history and powerful personalities of both the new museum and its site floors.( Wilson 2001 354).

In the midst of a group of buildings relatively small and medium enterprises of various types and uses, the New Museum rises 174 feet above street level. As visitors approach the Bowery or west along Prince Street, they encounter the building as a dramatic stack of six rectangular boxes.

This distinctive form derives directly from the solution architects to identify the fundamental challenges of their site: dense and ambitious program, including the need to open flexible gallery spaces of different heights and atmospheres, have been housed in an envelope zoning on a tight footprint of 71 feet wide and 112 feet deep.

To meet these conditions without creating a monolithic building, dark and airless, SANAA assigned key programmatic elements to a series of levels (six boxes), these boxes stacked and projected requirements of traffic building users, then drew the different levels below the vertebrae of the basic building laterally to the north, south, east or west.

The new museum is wearing a uniform, anodized expanded aluminum mesh chosen by SANAA to emphasize the volume of the boxes while dressing the whole building with a delicate, wispy, gently golden skin. Windows barely visible behind this porous canvas-like (made with common materials ever used for covering major building facades), the building appears as a single coherent form that is nevertheless mutable heroic, dynamic and animated by the the changing light of day appropriate visual metaphor for the opening of the new museum and the changing nature of contemporary art.

From the Streets to the ART

Visitors will be attracted to the new museum as seen through ...