The New Museum announced on Wednesday October 11th that OMA has been selected to design a new building for their next phase of expansion, to be led by OMA Partners Rem Koolhaas and Shohei Shigematsu.
OMA will design a new building on the adjacent property at 231 Bowery that the Museum purchased in 2008. The new structure will complement and respect the integrity of the Museum’s flagship SANAA building as a singular, critically acclaimed work of architecture. The expansion, first announced in May 2016, will double the Museum’s footprint on the Bowery, providing an additional 50,000 square feet for additional galleries, improved public circulation and flexible space for the institution’s continued exploration of new platforms and programs. The project is scheduled to break ground in 2019.
 
“I’m particularly excited that our first public building in New York City will be for the New Museum, one of the most forward-thinking institutions for which I’ve always had a great affinity,” said Rem Koolhaas. “Having collaborated with Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa on a number of projects in Europe, it is a real honor to stand alongside their great work of architecture, one of my favorites in the city.”
 
Shohei Shigematsu added, “I am honored to be awarded this project in the city perhaps most central to OMA’s philosophy, and am thrilled to work with an institution that deeply values the practices of creative forward-thinkers. As a Japanese architect, I am very happy to engage in a unique dialogue with SANAA and build alongside one of their seminal works.”
 

Funded by an $85 million capital campaign, the New Museum’s expansion builds upon extraordinary institutional momentum achieved over the past decade. The only museum in New York City devoted exclusively to contemporary art and a leading international cultural destination with 400,000 visitors annually, the New Museum is respected around the world for the groundbreaking and adventurous scope of its curatorial program and exhibitions. The Museum has also expanded its scholarly initiatives and blazed new trails with innovative platforms like IdeasCity, NEW INC, and Rhizome—programs devoted to collaborative and cross-disciplinary experimentation between art, urbanism, and technology. This next phase of expansion will provide greater space for these activities and a closer integration with the Museum’s renowned exhibition program.

“Building upon four decades of fostering new art and new ideas, the Board embraces this next chapter in the Museum’s history, which will provide artists and curators the space to experiment and grow in new ways,” said James Keith Brown, President, New Museum Board of Trustees.

The New Museum is the only museum in New York City exclusively devoted to contemporary art. Founded in 1977, the New Museum is a center for exhibitions, information, and documentation about living artists from around the world. From its beginnings as a one-room office on Hudson Street to the inauguration of its first freestanding building on the Bowery designed by SANAA in 2007, the New Museum continues to be a place of experimentation and a hub of new art and new ideas.

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Rem Koolhaas wwas born in Rotterdam on 17 November 1944. He began his career as a journalist working for the Haagse Post and also as a set designer in the Netherlands and Hollywood. He studied architecture at the Architectural Association School in London, and after winning the Harkness scholarship he moved to the USA. There he spent some time at the IAUS (Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies) in New York, a centre directed by Peter Eisenman. He later moved to Cornell University where he studied with Oswald Mathias Ungers.

In these early years of collaboration between Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp and Zoe Zenghelis, the name of the group while they were developing their first ideas and conceptual projects was more experimental: Office for Metropolitan Architecture – The Laboratory of Dr. Caligari. A time that served to consolidate initial ideas that would later lead to the formal founding of OMA in 1975 with his three colleagues.

In 1978 he wrote Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, which has become a classic of contemporary architectural theory.

The most important works by Koolhaas and OMA, from its foundation until the mid-1990s, include the Netherlands Dance Theatre at The Hague, the Nexus Housing at Fukuoka in Japan, the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, the Grand Palais of Euralille and Lille, the Villa dall’Ava, the Très Grande Bibliothèque, the Jussieu library in Paris, the ZKM in Karlsruhe and the Seattle Public Library.

Together with Koolhaas’s reflections on contemporary society, these buildings appear in his second book, S,M,L,XL (1995), a volume of 1376 pages written as though it were a “novel about architecture”. Published in collaboration with the Canadian graphic designer, Bruce Mau, the book contains essays, manifestos, cartoons and travel diaries.

In 2005, with Mark Wigley and Ole Bouman, he was the founder of the prestigious Volume magazine, the result of a collaboration with Archis (Amsterdam), AMO and C-lab (Columbia University NY).

His built work includes the Qatar National Library and the Qatar Foundation Headquarters (2018), Fondation Galeries Lafayette in Paris (2018), Fondazione Prada in Milan (2015/2018), Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow (2015), the headquarters for China Central Television (CCTV) in Beijing (2012), Casa da Musica in Porto (2005), Seattle Central Library (2004), and the Netherlands Embassy in Berlin (2003). Current projects include the Taipei Performing Arts Centre, a new building for Axel Springer in Berlin, and the Factory in Manchester.

Koolhaas directed the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale and is a professor at Harvard University, where he directs The Project on the City, a research programme on changes in urban conditions around the world. This program has conducted research on the delta of the Pearl River in China (entitled Great Leap Forward) and on consumer society (The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping). Taschen Verlag has published the results. Now is preparing a major exhibition for the Guggenheim Museum to open in 2019 entitled Countryside: Future of the World.

Among the awards he has won in recent years, we mention here the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize (2000), the Praemium Imperiale (2003), the Royal Gold Medal (2004) and the Mies Van Der Rohe Prize (2005). In 2008, Time mentioned him among the 100 most influential people on the planet.

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Shohei Shigematsu born in Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan in 1973. In 1996 graduated from the Department of Architecture at Kyushu University. Studying at the Berlage Institute in Amsterdam. He became an associate in 2004, joined OMA in 1998 and became a partner in 2008.

Sho is responsible for delivering several projects across North America, including Milstein Hall, an extension to the College of Architecture, Art and Planning at Cornell University; a new museum for the Musée national des Beaux-arts du Québec; the Faena Forum, a multi-purpose venue in Miami Beach; the renovation and reimagination of Sotheby’s Headquarters in New York; the Audrey Irmas Pavilion, a new event and gathering space extension for the Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles; and a holistic campus renovation and a new building for the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York. Sho’s cultural buildings currently in progress include a museum expansion for the New Museum in New York City and a new arts centre with a theatre and concert hall for the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Expanding upon his built work for museums and cultural institutions, Sho engages the art world through various facets, from collaborations with artists such as Cai Guo-Qiang and Marina Abramović to structures and strategies integrating landscape and resiliency including an underwater art park and distinct structure for the ReefLine in Miami Beach and a mushroom pavilion in Mexico.

Sho’s works in the fashion industry span typologies and scales, from redefined retail spaces as mediums for branding to exploration of exhibitions and scenographies as narrative mediums. In Japan, Sho led the design and successful completion of the Coach flagship in Tokyo and is currently overseeing Harajuku Quest, a cultural and commercial platform connecting Omotesando and Harajuku. Sho has worked with fashion brands and houses, as well as museums, on major exhibition designs—Louis Vuitton Visionary Journeys in Bangkok; Dior retrospectives in Denver, Dallas, and Tokyo; Prada “Waist Down” in Tokyo, Seoul, New York, and Los Angeles; and Manus x Machina at the Met Costume Institute.

Sho has built several innovative workspaces and mixed-use buildings, including the China Central TelevisionHeadquarters in Beijing (2012), the Shenzhen Stock Exchange Headquarters (2013), Tenjin Business Center in Fukuoka, Japan (2021), and most recently, the Toranomon Hills Station Tower for Mori Building Co, Ltd. In Tokyo(2023). His innovation centre design for the Chicago Center for Education & Research for Discovery Partners Institute (DPI) and the University of Illinois System is currently underway.

Sho has lectured at TED and Wired Japan conferences, and universities throughout the world. He has been a visiting professor at Cornell University College of Architecture, Art, and Planning (AAP), Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), and Columbia University GSAPP. He has been a professor at Kyushu University of Human Environment Studies and Director of BeCAT (Built Environment Center with Art & Technology) since 2021.

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Published on: October 14, 2017
Cite: "OMA selected to design Next Phase of Expansion of New Museum" METALOCUS. Accessed
<http://www.metalocus.es/en/news/oma-selected-design-next-phase-expansion-new-museum> ISSN 1139-6415
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