Now twelve years old, SANAA’s New Museum building is still an enigmatic structure. When it opened in 2007, the vertical museum was taller by far than most everything else on that stretch of the Bowery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side—Norman Foster’s imposing Sperone Westwater Gallery (2010) a few doors down, and Herzog & de Meuron’s 28-story Public Hotel (2017) just behind it had not yet been built. The precariously stacked boxes of the museum, veiled in a mysterious metal skin, were an instant attraction. Perhaps too much so. Millions of visitors have come through its doors—annual attendance jumped from 60,000 to 400,000 with the SANAA building. But movement up the various levels of galleries is not always so easy.
If circulation was a major concern for an addition to the SANAA museum—the Pritzker Prize–winning Japanese firm's first free-standing structure in the U.S.—the form that new building would take was another. Would it compete with SANAA’s heap, or would it bow down in deference to it? The institution had acquired a 50,000-square-foot building at 231 Bowery just next door to its current museum about the same time that building was completed, using it to capacity for a range of activities including additional gallery space, the museum’s cultural incubator NEW INC, office space, studio space for artists, archives, and back-of-house staging, prep, and storage. For a highly guarded competition for the addition, which is rumored to have strangely included SANAA themselves, a number of the short-listed firms are said to have maintained the existing building at 231 Bowery. The winning design by OMA, announced in October 2017 and revealed today, does not. According to the New Museum, “following extensive research and study of many options, including renovating the existing building, the museum concluded that new, ground up construction would be the most efficient way, both spatially and financially, to fulfill its needs and civic purpose.” Or maybe it just took some persuading by OMA.
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