EV Grieve: The New Museum, with a 60,000-square-foot expansion, will reopen this fall on the Bowery

Thursday, February 27, 2025

The New Museum, with a 60,000-square-foot expansion, will reopen this fall on the Bowery

Today, officials at The New Museum announced that its 60,000 square-foot building expansion on the Bowery at Prince Street will debut this fall.

This will also mark the reopening of The New Museum, which has been closed during the construction of the building next door, designed by OMA/Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas in collaboration with Cooper Robertson.

Here's more about the expanded space via the EVG inbox:

Complementing the New Museum's existing architecture, the OMA-designed expansion will appear distinct on the outside while being seamlessly integrated on the inside. The new seven-story building will double the Museum's gallery space, aligning ceiling heights on the second, third, and fourth floors for uninterrupted connectivity across both buildings. The OMA design will improve vertical circulation for visitors through the addition of an atrium stairway, which will offer views of the surrounding neighborhood and the opportunity for site-specific art installations, as well as three additional elevators, two of which will be dedicated to gallery access.

On the ground level, the Museum's enlarged lobby will feature an expanded bookstore as well as a full-service restaurant, while just outside a new entrance plaza will create an open-air venue for public art installations at the terminus of Bowery and Prince Street. On the Museum's upper floors, the new building will include a dedicated studio for artists-in-residence [and] a 74-seat forum...

And about the inaugural exhibition:

Continuing the New Museum's long history of presenting provocative and timely thematic exhibitions, "New Humans: Memories of the Future" will inaugurate the expanded building with an exploration of artists’ enduring preoccupation with what it means to be human in the face of sweeping technological changes.

Spanning the entire Museum, New Humans will trace a diagonal history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through the work of more than 150 international artists, writers, scientists, architects, and filmmakers, highlighting key moments when dramatic technological and societal changes spurred new conceptions of humanity and new visions for its possible futures.

Here are some EVG photos from earlier this month showing the work in progress...