New Museum

In 1977, Marcia Tucker founded the New Museum of Contemporary Art with ambitions set on becoming one of the premier contemporary art museum in New York City . The New Museum now resdies in a new building that was designed by Tokyo-based architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA 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, in the Lower East Side .The New Museum opened to the public on December 1, 2007, coinciding with the institution’s 30th anniversary. The unique building is as much a part of the museum as the artwork.

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 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.

The Museum sits amidst a cluster of relatively small and midsized buildings of varying types and uses, The building rises 174 feet above street level. 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. This resulted in a the shifted-box approach that yields a variety of open, fluid internal spaces that are different heights at every level, with different characteristics but all column-free.

New Museum of Contemporary Art , 235 Bowery St New York, NY phone 212.219.1222

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One Response to “New Museum”

1. new york museum says:

   March 6, 2010 at 12:04 pm

   [...] a new chapter. The endless hours of pounding the pavement clutching my new toy in anticipation …New Museum | Manhattan StyleThe New Museum building is a home for contemporary art and an incubator for new ideas, as well as an [...]