The expansion for the New Museum by OMA / Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas in collaboration with Cooper Robertson, set to open in fall 2025, will complement the existing flagship building on the Bowery at Prince Street, while doubling the Museum’s gallery space; improving visitor flow through the addition of three elevators, an atrium staircase, and an entry plaza; creating new spaces for artist residencies and public programs; and establishing a purpose-built home for the Museum’s cultural incubator, NEW INC, among many other new and expanded features, marking a transformative moment for the Museum and the city.
“The New Museum is an incubator for new perspectives and cultural production, and the expansion aims to embody that attitude of openness. Conceived as a highly connected yet distinct counterpart to the verticality and solidity of the existing museum, the new building will offer expansive horizontal galleries for curatorial variety, open vertical circulation, and a diversity of spaces for gathering, sharing, and creating. The building is designed to create an active public face, including an open-air plaza on the ground floor, moments of transparency throughout the central atrium, and terraced openings above, that will openly interact with the surrounding community and beyond.”
Shohei Shigematsu, Partner at OMA.
Rendering of the expanded New Museum by OMA. Rendering courtesy by OMA/bloomimages.de.
Complementing the existing architecture of the New Museum, the OMA-designed addition will look distinct on the outside and blend seamlessly into the interior. The new seven-story building will double the Museum’s gallery space, aligning ceiling heights on the second, third, and fourth floors for seamless connectivity between the two buildings. OMA’s design will enhance vertical circulation for visitors by adding an atrium staircase, 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.
“We are extremely grateful to all those who are making the next chapter of the New Museum a reality, which would not be possible without the generous support of our Board of Trustees, as well as the numerous individuals, foundations, and governments behind this important project. We look forward to opening the new building with the kind of ambitious exhibition for which the New Museum is known, enlivening our expanded Bowery home with a timely exploration of artists’ visions for the future.”
James-Keith Brown, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the New Museum.
Rendering of the expanded New Museum by OMA. Rendering courtesy by OMA/bloomimages.de.
The OMA building will be named in honor of the late visionary philanthropist Toby Devan Lewis, a long-serving New Museum Trustee whose $30 million contribution to the Capital Campaign is the largest gift in the Museum’s history. To date, the New Museum has raised $118 million towards its Capital Campaign goal of $125 million, with $82 million in construction costs.
On the ground level, the Museum’s enlarged lobby will feature an expandedbookstore as well as a full-service restaurant, while just outside a new entranceplaza will create an open-air venue for public art installations at the terminus ofBowery and Prince Street. On the Museum’s upper floors, the new building willinclude a dedicated studio for artists-in-residence, a 74-seat forum, and apurpose-built home for NEW INC, the first museum-born cultural incubator, whichwill equip its annual cohort of 120+ creative entrepreneurs with collaborativeworking spaces and top-of-line production facilities.
The New Museum’s seventh floor Sky Room will double in size while retaining its panoramic views of downtown Manhattan, and the expanded building will include three additional upper-floor terraces overlooking the Bowery. On the exterior, laminated glass with metal mesh will provide a simple, unified façade by using materials that recall and complement the original SANAA building while allowing for a higher degree of transparency.
Rendering of the expanded New Museum by OMA. Rendering courtesy by OMA/bloomimages.de.
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 thetwentieth and twenty-first centuries through the work of more than 150international artists, writers, scientists, architects, and filmmakers, highlightingkey moments when dramatic technological and societal changes spurred newconceptions of humanity and new visions for its possible futures. Placing new andrecent works by artists including Sofia Al-Maria, Lucy Beech, Meriem Bennani,Cyprien Gaillard, Pierre Huyghe, Tau Lewis, Daria Martin, Wangechi Mutu, PreciousOkoyomon, Berenice Olmedo, Philippe Parreno, Hito Steyerl, Jamian Juliano-Villani,Andro Wekua, and Anicka Yi in the context of works by twentieth century artistsand cultural figures such as Francis Bacon, Constant Nieuwenhuys, Salvador Dalí,Ibrahim El-Salahi, H.R. Giger, Kiki Kogelnik, Hannah Höch, Tatsuo Ikeda, GyulaKosice, El Lissitzky, Lennart Nilsson, Eduardo Paolozzi, Carlo Rambaldi, GermaineRichier, and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, New Humans illuminates the ways inwhich artists’ visions of the future have evolved throughout time. Major support forNew Humans is provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Pierre Huyghe, Human Mask, 2014 (still). Single-channel video, color, sound; 19 min. Photograph courtesy by the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photograph by Pierre Huyghe and 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.
“Since its founding, the New Museum has looked at art as a tool that can help usunderstand the world around us. New Humans is an encyclopedic, interdisciplinaryexhibition that continues the Museum's engagement with the most pressing issuesof today. Through the work of more than 150 artists, writers, and culturalfigures, New Humans reveals how our most terrifying contemporary concerns are infact as old as humanity itself. As the New Museum enters an expansive newchapter in its own history, New Humans highlights the role artists play ininterpreting and confronting the critical issues that will shape our collective fate.”
Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson ArtisticDirector of the New Museum.
