The New Museum is the only museum in New York City dedicated exclusively to contemporary art. From its beginnings as a one-room office on Hudson Street to the inauguration of its first freestanding building on the Bowery, designed by SANAA in 2007, it has evolved into a center for exhibitions, research, and documentation on international living artists. In 2017, Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas of OMA were selected to design the New Museum's expansion. The first design images were released in 2019. This year, the Museum announced that its 60,000-square-foot expansion, designed in collaboration with Cooper Robertson, will open in fall 2025 with an exhibition exploring the very definition of humanity.
The OMA-designed expansion will complement the New Museum's existing SANAA-designed flagship building while doubling gallery space, improving visitor circulation, and providing a dedicated home for the Museum's cultural incubator, NEW INC. According to Shohei Shigematsu, OMA Partner and Director of OMA New York, the expansion embodies the Museum's openness as an incubator for new cultural perspectives and artistic production. The new OMA building will be named in honor of the late philanthropist Toby Devan Lewis in recognition to its contribution to the Capital Campaign. To date, the New Museum has raised $118 million toward its $125 million Capital Campaign goal, with $82 million allocated for construction costs.
The seven-story expansion will appear distinct on the exterior while seamlessly integrating with the existing structure inside. It will align ceiling heights on the second, third, and fourth floors for uninterrupted connectivity between the two buildings. Improved vertical circulation will include an atrium stairway, offering neighborhood views and opportunities for site-specific art installations, as well as three additional elevators, two dedicated to gallery access.
On the ground level, the Museum's expanded lobby will feature an enlarged bookstore and a full-service restaurant, while a new entrance plaza will provide an open-air venue for public art installations at the intersection of Bowery and Prince Street. The upper floors will house a dedicated studio for artists-in-residence, a 74-seat forum, and a new home for NEW INC, the first museum-led cultural incubator, equipping over 120 creative entrepreneurs annually with collaborative workspaces and production facilities.
The Museum's seventh-floor Sky Room will double in size while maintaining its panoramic views of downtown Manhattan. The expansion will also include three additional terraces overlooking the Bowery. The building's exterior will feature laminated glass with metal mesh, creating a unified façade that complements the original SANAA structure while enhancing transparency.
Imagined as a highly connected yet distinct counterpart to the existing museum's verticality and solidity, the new building will offer horizontally expansive galleries for curatorial variety, open vertical circulation, and a diversity of spaces for gathering, exchange, and creation. The building is further shaped to create an active public face—including an outdoor plaza at the ground, moments of transparency throughout the central atrium, and terraced openings at the top—that will openly engage the surrounding community and beyond.
— Shohei Shigematsu, OMA Partner and Director of OMA New York
According to Lisa Phillips, Toby Devan Lewis Director of the New Museum, "The New Museum has always been a future-facing museum—not a place for preserving and recording history, but a place where history is made." Reflecting this vision, the inaugural expansion exhibition, New Humans: Memories of the Future, will explore how artists have grappled with the question of what it means to be human amid sweeping technological changes. Spanning the entire Museum, the exhibition will present works by more than 150 international artists, writers, scientists, architects, and filmmakers, tracing key moments when technological and societal shifts have reshaped conceptions of humanity and visions for its future.
In addition to New Humans, the expanded New Museum will reopen with multiple site-specific commissions enabled by the new architectural spaces. Among them is VENUS VICTORIA by Sarah Lucas, the first recipient of the Hostetler/Wrigley Sculpture Award, a biannual juried prize supporting new work by women artists. The piece will be displayed on the Museum's public entrance plaza. Further details on new commissions, residencies, public programs, institutional collaborations, and exhibitions enabled by the expansion will be announced in the coming months.
OMA is an international practice led by seven partners (Rem Koolhaas, Reinier de Graaf, Shohei Shigematsu, Iyad Alsaka, Chris van Duijn, Jason Long, and Managing Partner-Architect David Gianotten) with offices in Rotterdam, New York, Hong Kong, and Australia. Its recent projects worldwide include the exhibition scenography for the Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; the renovation of the Gallery of the Kings at the Museo Egizio in Turin, Italy; and the Simone Veil Bridge in Bordeaux, France. Additionally, among the firm's urban-focused projects is the renovation of Perth Concert Hall in Australia, a 51-year-old heritage-listed venue, set to begin in early 2025.
