A New New Museum, for Humans and Robots and Everyone in Between

When the New Museum reopens this fall on New York’s Lower East Side, after a major expansion that shuttered it in March 2024, it will almost double its exhibition space to more than 20,000 square feet, thanks to a new, free-standing building designed by Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas of the architecture firm OMA. It is the first public building in New York City by OMA, and will be interwoven with the museum’s Sanaa-designed building from 2007.

From the outside, the addition will look distinct from the flagship at 235 Bowery, at Prince Street. Against the irregularly stacked, opaque cubes of the original building, Shigematsu and Koolhaas’s design is angular. It emphasizes transparency and upward movement, with staircases and elevator shaft visible from the street leading up to terraces on its upper stories. The interior of the two buildings will be seamlessly connected.

The artistic director of the museum, Massimiliano Gioni, said in a recent interview that in the face of all this newness, it seemed fitting for the museum to tackle “ideas of the future, rebirth and new starts.” Gioni’s opening exhibition, titled “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” will unpack the question of what it means to be human in the face of sweeping, even paradigm-shifting, technological change.

The gestation of the show and the building happened during, and in the wake of, the Covid-19 pandemic, “when the question of whether there was even such a thing as a world to come was debatable,” the curator added. “So we decided to look at how artists imagined such possibilities in different times in history.”