New CampaignHello Museum

The New Museum broke ground in November 2022 on a major building expansion designed by OMA. The Museum’s $100 million Capital Campaign has majority support from the Board of Trustees, as well as from the City and State of New York. The largest gift in the institution’s history comes from the late Toby Devan Lewis, longtime Trustee and exceptional philanthropist. The Museum will recognize Lewis’s leadership role by naming the OMA building in her honor. Please join us as we continue to explore the future of new art and new ideas, where the only constant is change.

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Since our founding over forty-five years ago, the New Museum has been a site of experimentation and a hub for new art and new ideas, where risk-taking and discovery are encouraged and supported. We have always been a future-facing museum—not a place for preserving and recording history, but a place where history is made. Founded in 1977 in a temporary space on Hudson Street, the New Museum has continued to act nimbly to present art that serves as a catalyst for dialogue between contemporary artists and the public. We have expanded our footprint at key moments in the Museum’s history to better serve these goals, and this project is the latest chapter in that history.

Our new, ground-up construction replaces 231 Bowery—in which our cultural incubator NEW INC, our new media affiliate Rhizome, and artists’ residencies have been housed—and make these programs more accessible to the public. In this new building designed by OMA / Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas, the New Museum will continue to make history.

We are thrilled to work with OMA / Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas to design a second building that addresses our current and future needs. It will also be OMA’s first public building in New York. Known for their civic passion and future thinking, OMA has created a design that complements and respects the integrity of the Museum’s SANAA-designed flagship building and provides seamless connectivity between the two buildings, expanded space for our world-renowned exhibitions, and increased access to our most innovative programs.

Shigematsu and Koolhaas are both partners at OMA, the acclaimed architecture and urbanism practice. Recent ground-up constructions and expansions of innovative cultural spaces designed by OMA include the Taipei Performing Arts Centre, Taiwan (2022); Audrey Irmas Pavilion, Los Angeles, CA (2022); Denver Art Museum’s Design Galleries and Studio (2021); Axel Springer Campus, Berlin, Germany (2020); and WA Museum Boola Bardip, Australia (2020). Earlier buildings include Sotheby’s New York Headquarters (2019); Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy (2018); Faena Forum, Miami, FL (2016); Pierre Lassonde Pavilion for Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec, Canada (2016); Cai Studio, NY (2015); Milstein Hall at Cornell University, NY (2011); and Casa da Música in Porto, Portugal (2005). In addition to the New Museum, OMA-designed projects currently under construction include Buffalo AKG Art Museum, NY; an addition to Tiffany & Co.’s Fifth Avenue Landmark Building, NY; Library Street Collective’s LANTERN in Detroit, MI; and Factory International in Manchester, England.

The seven-story, 60,000-square-foot building will double the Museum’s exhibition spaces. Merging with current galleries on the Second, Third, and Fourth Floors, the OMA building will align ceiling heights to achieve connectivity between the buildings with additional space dedicated to community and education programs, including a permanent home for NEW INC. Further cementing the New Museum’s centrality to the cultural fabric of downtown Manhattan, the OMA expansion features a new public plaza at the intersection of the Bowery and Prince Street that will host art installations, performances, and gatherings. With this vastly expanded footprint and dynamic accessibility, the new building will exponentially increase our community impact.

The OMA design will improve vertical circulation for museum visitors with the addition of an atrium stairway, which will offer views of the surrounding neighborhood and the opportunity for innovative art installations. The stairway and new entry will align with the terminus of Prince Street, opening up the Museum to the city with a visual invitation to enter the building and climb to the top of a world of cultural possibilities. The OMA building will also provide more public spaces and services, including an expanded lobby, a larger bookstore, an upper-level forum for education and public programs that will connect to the existing Sky Room, an artist studio, and a new eighty-seat restaurant. In addition, it will feature three additional elevators—two of which will be dedicated to gallery access—as well as more efficient organization of vital back-of-house, storage, and office space.

Made out of laminated glass with metal mesh, the façade will provide a simple, unified exterior adjacent to the SANAA building by using materials that recall and complement the original façade while allowing for a higher degree of transparency. The OMA building will communicate the activities of the Museum outward, while creating an inviting presence that also draws the public inward.

For more information about how to get involved with the New Museum Capital Campaign, please email Scott Campbell, Director of Campaign Advancement, at scampbell@newmuseum.org.

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