Having developed a reputation for precisely detailed, exquisitely refined buildings, the Tokyo-based firm SANAA faced a very different kind of challenge with the New Museum in Lower Manhattan: Design a building for an anti-establishment museum in a scruffy-but-gentrifying part of town. Do it on a tight budget. And be careful, because the critics are weary of museums that are either formal extravagances or dull containers. Against the odds, SANAA, headed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, has delivered a building that pleases both the critics and the public. Its New Museum, which rises seven stories on the Bowery, points the neighborhood in a new direction—out of a previous era of flophouses and gin mills and toward a time of creative engagement. Whether by design or coincidence, its off-kilter arrangement of stacked boxes alludes to a moment of instability—in New York’s cultural scene, economic future, and demographic mix. Instead of glossing over the city’s reckoning with unsettling forces, the New Museum brings it front and center—an attitude that seems just right for an organization founded in 1977 by a curator, Marcia Tucker, the day after she was fired by the Whitney Museum of American Art. For the next three decades, the New Museum bounced around Lower Manhattan, carrying out its mission to show provocative contemporary artwork.
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