NEW YORK | The New Museum opening

[NYguy]

http://archrecord.construction.com/n.../071129nyc.asp

Sanaa's NYC New Museum Opens

November 29, 2007
By Alec Appelbaum

The design for the New Museum, which the Tokyo-based firm Sejima + Nishizawa/Sanaa first revealed in 2003 for New York City’s only all-contemporary art institution, layers six off-kilter white boxes above a formerly grungy block on the Lower East Side. That striking shape led many people to expect a show-offy building. But its architects hope that when the $50 million, 60,000-square-foot museum officially opens this weekend, visitors and passersby will instead be struck by its neighborly spirit. The shift of each box creates space for a terrace or skylight, providing views of surrounding buildings from each stairwell, while its ground floor engages the street with transparency.



“The museum wanted to keep everything as open as possible,” says Sanaa project architect Florian Idenburg. The designers satisfied this demand with gestures such as a lobby whose glass panes meet the sidewalk as they descend into trenches, and a first floor with open vistas of ground-floor galleries and a freight elevator. Video installations on this level will probably run all night, says co-project architect Toshi Oki, so that “at 3 o’clock in the morning you will see the art from the street.”



Also visible from the street, most strikingly along the building’s west elevation, is a cladding that might become the museum’s signature: an expanded-aluminum mesh that projects as a screen three inches off the steel-and-concrete facade. The architects say they chose the material, commissioned from a British firm called Expamet, for its potential to deflect light into the museum. But they also expect it will add to the client’s branding. The same mesh defines a curtain in the tight first floor that the architects designed to seal off a small retail area. “The shape is so aggressive,” Oki explains, “it can become a symbol of the museum, like the shape of the building.” The silhouette is an echo, of sorts, of the Whitney and Guggenheim buildings uptown, and it dominates the New Museum’s marketing material.



The New Museum’s four gallery floors provide different envelopes for traveling and temporary shows: mechanical systems are concentrated at the core allowing for column-free space. The fifth floor contains classrooms, and computer space for an online learning program, while offices occupy the sixth floor. On the seventh story sits a 2,000-square-foot event space with a wraparound terrace. The architects joke that the museum may recoup its investment by renting out that floor, which offers dramatic views across Manhattan and the East River.

In another move intended to help the museum remain tied to its context, the architects added a sixth-floor window mainly because it neatly frames a view of the Empire State Building.

[NYguy]

http://gothamist.com/2007/11/29/a_preview_of_th.php

A Preview of the Nearly Opened New Museum

November 29, 2007



Beginning at noon this Saturday the New Museum will open its new doors, but this morning
we snuck a peak inside. The gray aluminum mesh exterior of the building is a whimsical stack
of rectilinear boxes shifted off-axis, not unlike a pile of blocks arranged haphazardly by a
toddler. It's a bold, dynamic presence on the Bowery and, along with the Bowery Hotel,
signifies yet another firm step away from the area's gritty past.

After the jump, tons of pictures from inside every nook and cranny of the museum.



Perhaps the most striking feature inside the seven story museum is the complete absence of
internal columns; the building is held together by a series of cross-bracings and the skylights
allow natural light to filter through spaces where the stories are offset. The three main floors
of galleries are airy but not particularly capacious, creating a cozy, modest context for the
work. The fifth floor is given over to an educational center; the ground floor lobby features a
bookstore, cafe and glass-walled gallery space; the basement level houses a 182-seat
theater. On the seventh floor, an outdoor patio and glass enclosed event space will be used
for installations and private soirees; the view of downtown from up there isn't bad.

The inaugural exhibit is titled "Unmonumental" and is an "international survey on all three main
gallery floors that opens with sculpture by 30 artists from around the globe, then expands
over the course of five months into a dense, teeming environmental experience through the
addition of layers and collage, sound, and internet-based art." This will be on view through
March 23rd, and there are a few major commissioned installations on the horizon as well.
You'll see one of these greeting you before you even enter the building: The "Hell Yes!" sign
(Ugo Rondinone) brightens up the Bowery and will be the first of many public art installations
on the facade.

_

Naturally the museum can't afford to be shy about jumping in bed with corporate sponsors, so
the first 30 straight hours of its opening - which goes on continuously through the night - will
be sponsored by Target and admission will be free. Naturally, all the free tickets have already
been distributed. But don't despair; they expect some tickets to go unused, "thus it may be
possible for visitors to show up during the course of the marathon event and get a ticket on
the spur of the moment; but there is absolutely no guarantee!" In other words, you'll have a
good shot of getting in for free around 3am. After they burn through all the Target
sponsorship money, it'll cost $12.



Above photo of the lobby cafe, with mischievously mis-matched chairs.



Foreground: "Canon enigmatico a 108 voces" by Abraham Cruzvillegas. Background (sofa
bed) "Fuck Destiny" by Sarah Lucas. Further back is "Cube" by Rebecca Warren.




Ground floor "BLACK ON WHITE, GRAY ASCENDING" by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries.



"Our Love is Like the Flowers, the Rain, the Sea and the Hours (Tree)" by Martin Boyce.
Photo by Jake Dobkin.



Lower level theater.



"Split Endz (wig mix)" by Jim Lambie.



"Myth Monolith (Liberation Movement)" by Marc Andre Robinson.



"Untitled (Kerze)" by Urs Fischer. Photo by Jake Dobkin



Lots of architectural critics commented on the slim staircase from the 5th to the 6th floor--
there's a small gallery off the landing with an audio piece.



The bathroom tiling is totally insane.



No, seriously-- it's really totally insane. (Picture from our frenemies at Curbed.)



Skyline shot from the seventh floor balconies-- the view of downtown is the true highlight of the visit.



View from inside the skybox on the 7th floor.



Last but not least, a view of the lattice-skin mesh. It doesn't look as good up close as it
does from far away, but it's still kind of funky.

More pictures can be found at the Gothamist Flickr stream.
http://flickr.com/photos/gothamistll...7603327643014/



________________________________________

http://curbed.com/archives/2007/11/2...ealed.php#more

Curbed Inside: Hell Yes, New Museum Revealed!

Thursday, November 29, 2007, by Lockhart

The New Museum opens to the public on Saturday with a free kick-off extravaganza (did you
get your Target-sponsored reservation?), but the gang at 235 Bowery invited the press over
this morning for a little preview. Finally, we were able to crawl into the womb of SANAA's
crazy minimalist creation, and what we found was—dramatic pause—an art museum. What,
you were expecting a Japanese palace where animé fantasies spring to life in a burst of
rainbows? Us too, but we digress. In truth, the New Museum felt small, like you could knock
the whole thing out in a half-hour before Sunday brunch. But the views (to the LES, Tribeca,
Soho, FiDi and beyond) are killer, and the place sells Cheese Puffs, so it's pretty much a must-see.


We booked this room for our Super Bowl party.


Seventh Floor event space (The Sky Terrace), looking towards BLUE, THOR et al.


Seventh Floor, looking downtown.


Out on the patio, looking west to Soho.


A preservationist's dream: Trump behind bars.


The satellite Genius Bar location. Total j/k. It's the fifth-floor resource center! No, you
cannot check your Gmail on them. We tried.


Learn, my little contemporary artists, learn!


The cage (aka Sam Durant's ...For People Who Refuse to Knuckle Down, 2004).


The most over-hyped stairwell in town? Cue the Goldberger: "The most exciting space in the
building is only four feet wide and some fifty feet high, and is tucked behind the elevators: it
contains a stairway connecting the third- and fourth-floor galleries. I have never been
anywhere at once so eerily narrow and so gloriously monumental." Sure, buddy.


Oh, one more thing: Hell Yes!


http://www.newmuseum.org/

[WonderlandPark]

WTF is the gay pride "hell yes" thing about? Ruins the clean architecture IMO.

[pj3000]

The rainbow "Hell.Yes" on the building's exterior is utterly ridiculous and awesome. So many people will see that and just be confounded.

The sculptor's words:

"I was thinking about outside sculpture, so I needed something that could communicate to a wide range of society, without restrictions, and the rainbow is appealing for everyone. Everyone can relate to it."

[atl2phx]

on first glance, i love it. very cool.

not sure how it will age, but it's NYC, so based on location alone, it gets 100 bonus cool points.

the bathroom urinals alone give it another 10 cool points:

[Boquillas]

AWE. SOME.


This proves NYC still has the contemporary edge.

[NYguy]

Originally Posted by WonderlandPark

WTF is the gay pride "hell yes" thing about? Ruins the clean architecture IMO.

It's a piece of art that's probably temporary. The building itself reminds me of 2 Columbus Circle.

[NYguy]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/30/ar...hp&oref=slogin

New Look for the New Museum




By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
November 30, 2007

New York is in the cultural doldrums. The city is bursting with gorgeous art exhibitions, but where is the raw energy? Where is the new blood, intent on upending the establishment? Today, once-rebellious talents often seem to be wandering lost in the constellation of celebrity, where they soon settle into complacency.

Designed by the Japanese firm Sanaa, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, on the Bowery at Prince Street on the Lower East Side, is the kind of building that renews your faith in New York as a place where culture is lived, not just bought and sold.

The architects, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, conceived the building as a series of mismatched galleries precariously stacked one atop the other. It succeeds on a spectacular range of levels: as a hypnotic urban object, as a subtle critique of the art world and as a refreshingly unpretentious place to view art.

But what elevates the building itself to art is the way it captures an unnerving moment in the city’s cultural history with near-perfect pitch. Its ethereal forms hover somewhere between the legacy of a fading bohemian downtown and the ravenous appetites of a society awash in new money. That the building is so artfully rooted in the present means that its haunting quality will probably deepen as the city ages around it.

Ms. Sejima and Mr. Nishizawa may have seemed unlikely candidates to shake up the establishment. The pair is known for work of a high level of refinement and an almost aching sensitivity to a project’s social and physical context.

Their most celebrated project, the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, is a collection of discrete pavilions enveloped in a glistening one-story glass cylinder — a heavenly village of art whose intricate network of corridors obliterates the conventional museum narrative. Its sleek forms are pieced together with a precision and care that are closer in spirit to the layout of a computer’s circuit board than to the big industrial machines fetishized by the early Modernists.

But the architects decided that aiming for a similar level of refinement at the New Museum would have been unwise. For one thing, the quality of craftsmanship in New York is known to be substandard, compared with the workmanship at construction sites in, say, Japan. And the 60,000-square-foot New Museum building was built on a relatively modest budget of $50 million.

More important, the museum was intent on staying tethered to what was left of the rough-and-tumble downtown art scene. The decision to move the institution from SoHo to the Bowery was an effort to tap into its history — its uninhibited characters, seedy settings, voyeuristic attractions and, above all, rejection of bourgeois tastes.

The seven-story building stands amid the remnants of this forgotten landscape and a new one. The dirty brick facades of a few restaurant-supply stores and S.R.O.’s flank it on two sides. SoHo’s glitzy boutiques and showrooms are a few blocks to the west; the cheap, pretentious glass towers that embody the latest wave of gentrification are rising to the east and north.

The museum serves as a hinge between these two worlds. As it rises, its floors shift back and forth like a pile of boxes stacked ever so carefully. Its protective armor of shimmering aluminum mesh is a great ornamental screen. Exquisitely detailed, it is backed by a second layer of metal panels, giving the surface a subtle depth.

What results is a striking expression of the neighborhood’s warring identities. When the building is approached from Prince Street, the contrast between the instability of the forms and the uniformity of the aluminum gives it a strangely enigmatic glow, evoking both a fading past and a phantom future. As you get closer, the skin becomes tougher and more industrial, echoing what’s left of the neighborhood’s grittier history.

The formal ambiguity is coupled with a fierce desire to bridge the divide between art and everyday life. Only a thin sheet of floor-to-ceiling glass separates the sidewalk from the museum’s ground floor. Inside a lobby and loading dock are set side by side, so that pedestrians can watch the art being moved in and out of the building or gaze across to a small cafe and gallery at the rear of the lobby.

From here, visitors can contemplate the chaos of the city in relative silence, forging a seamless connection to the public life of the street. (That seamlessness drives home a practical point, too, since the entire ground floor is open to the public, free.)

It’s only when you ascend to the upper floors, however, that you begin to glean the meaning of the museum’s unusual form. By shifting the positions of the various floors, the architects were able to create narrow skylights along the outer edges of the galleries, allowing a soft, diffuse sunlight to wash down their white walls during the day. Rows of fluorescent lights are suspended from the ceilings, and the mix of artificial and natural light gives the spaces a lovely warmth that shifts ever so slightly with the weather or time of day.

This talent for extracting meaning from simple but unexpected choices — like shifting the position of a floor or the texture of a material — is what imbues Sanaa’s architecture with a hint of mystery. Here, that effect surfaces in myriad ways. Because the position of the skylights varies from floor to floor, the quality of the light is never exactly the same. Some gallery floors are compact, some tall, and others far bigger but with lower ceilings. They have an intuitive relationship to one another without becoming repetitive.

Most significantly, the design brings the art to life. To focus attention on its new building, the museum chose to open with a show of contemporary sculpture; the walls are left entirely bare. Even so, you can feel the architects’ empathy for the artist’s hand. The gentle shifts in scale, proportion and light heighten your awareness of the surroundings, which, in turn, draws you closer to the artworks. The shifting mood of the rooms constantly encourages you to observe the sculptures from different, unexpected perspectives.

That effect is reinforced by the rawness of the spaces — exposed beams, painted white walls, cracked concrete floors. The informal quality makes the art feel wonderfully accessible. There is nothing ostentatious here, none of the fussy detailing or fancy materials that create an invisible barrier between viewer and art in so many contemporary museums and galleries.

There are other surprises. A narrow staircase, 50 feet long and 4 feet wide, connects the third and fourth floors, exaggerating the distance between the two and heightening your anticipation to the point of torture. At the top, a narrow wedge of space connects the staircase to the gallery, inducing a sudden sense of compression before you experience the release of stepping into the exhibition. Elsewhere, a few eccentric pockets of space are set in the corners for more intimate installations.

It will take some time, of course, to understand what impact the new building, and the art institution it houses, will have on the cultural life of New York. But not since the Museum of Modern Art rattled the foundations of the city’s art establishment in the 1930s has a museum seemed so in touch with the present.

Poised at one edge of a city struggling to regain its creative momentum, the New Museum building embodies a leap of faith. It suggests a breathing space somewhere between the innocence of New York’s artistic past and an encroaching money-driven cynicism. It’s hard to think of another architect who’s been able to capture that uneasy optimism with such grace.



Exterior of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, on the Lower East Side.

Video:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2...M_GRAPHIC.html

http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_stor...e6a817e2b98a18

[yarabundi]

This is an absolute ugliness. The worst of it : we'll get acustomed to it !!
However, I have to agree on the view from the 7th floor.

[skylife]

Maybe I'm a philistine, but I truly dislike the exterior of this building.

[CGII]

I really enjoyed Ouroussof's review in the Times, but I still can't take the exterior. I guess I'd have to see it in person. I'm still lamenting the rape of 2 Columbus Cirkle.

[Dac150]

I don't care for art that much let alone this. From my viewpoint this is just another trendy art museum. The architecture, eh, something you'd expect for this sort, and that "Hell Yes"....give me a break.

[edluva]

NYC is just too fucking awesome

[antinimby]

Originally Posted by skylife

Maybe I'm a philistine, but I truly dislike the exterior of this building.

Me neither.

[pico44]

It's beautiful. It's clean lines and shiny surgace are the perfect contrast to the gritty charm of the Bowery.

[NYguy]

Originally Posted by Dac150

I don't care for art that much let alone this. From my viewpoint this is just another trendy art museum. The architecture, eh, something you'd expect for this sort, and that "Hell Yes"....give me a break.

LOL, I guess it is safe to say you don't care for art that much. Love it or hate it though, I think its the type of thing the city needs more of. Downtown may not be what it used to be, but it is Downtown. I think the idea of the place may be more important than the building.

[Dac150]

Originally Posted by NYguy

LOL, I guess it is safe to say you don't care for art that much. Love it or hate it though, I think its the type of thing the city needs more of. Downtown may not be what it used to be, but it is Downtown. I think the idea of the place may be more important than the building.

Well as long as it's doing good for the city, then that's all that matters to me.

[GVNY]

I don't find it particularly attractive, but it is very tucked away and thus won't bother me.

And so New York maintains and builds the cool factor, yet we don't have to see it everywhere. Perfect!

[NYguy]

More images/renderings of the building...



designcrack.com



lockhartsteele.com



arcspace.com



enavant.com



enavant.com