When the New Museum, long a champion of downtown New York culture and unconventional art, announced that it would build itself a new home on the Bowery--a mostly bleak strip of flophouses and restaurant-supply storefronts--the art world wondered what this move would mean for the museum, and, just as important, how the museum would look. Tokyo-based architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA (winners of the 2010 Pritzker Prize) received the commission in 2002; their new New Museum, which opened in December 2007, looks like a dramatic tower of seven rectangular boxes, stacked irregularly atop one another with edges protruding to the sides and front, and clad in a seamless anodized-aluminum mesh that dresses the whole of the building in a delicate, filmy, softly shimmering skin. With windows just visible behind this porous scrimlike surface, the building appears as a single, coherent and even heroic form that is nevertheless mutable, dynamic and animated by the changing light of day--an appropriate visual metaphor for the openness of the New Museum and the ever-changing nature of contemporary art. This monograph treats the institution's design and construction in depth, through images, writings and an interview with the architects.

Book Information
ISBN 9788434312449
Author Lisa Sanaa
Format Paperback
Page Count 79
Imprint Ediciones Poligrafa
Publisher Ediciones Poligrafa