New Museum Sets Opening Date

Designed by OMA partners Rem Koolhaas and Shohei Shigematsu with executive architect Cooper Robertson (now part of Corgan), the much-anticipated New Museum expansion is one of our “26 Things to Look Forward to in ‘26.” Heck, we even included it in our “25 Things to Look Forward to in ’25,” given that a fall 2025 opening was the most recent target. Various delays push the opening to this spring, with the museum recently announcing the opening date of Saturday, March 21, and free admission that weekend.

The New Museum, founded in 1977, occupied various buildings in Lower Manhattan until it moved into its competition-winning SANAA building—its first purpose-built home—on the Bowery in 2007. Although a non-collecting institution devoted to contemporary art, the New Museum quickly outgrew its new home and expanded into an existing building next door for its offices, NEW INC cultural incubator, and artists' residencies. These functions, plus additional exhibition space on a trio of floors aligned with the SANAA building and a large atrium behind the front facade, will be housed in the OMA-designed expansion. Additionally, the angled front facade will result in the creation of a small plaza along the Bowery.

OMA was selected to design the 60,000-square-foot expansion in 2017, one year after expansion plans were revealed, beating out SANAA, Selldorf Architects, wHY, and SO-IL in a two-stage competition. The design by Koolhaas and Shigematsu was unveiled in 2019, when an opening date of 2022 was anticipated, but the global pandemic obviously derailed those plans. As such, construction didn't start until 2022, with the museum closing in March 2024 for what will eventually be a two-year period come this March.

In April, following the opening, longtime New Museum director Lisa Phillips will step down from her post of 27 years. In a statement, she described the new OMA/SANAA home of the museum as signaling the institution's “redoubled commitment to new art and new ideas, and to the museum as an ever-evolving site for risk-taking, collaboration, and experimentation.” The new building will be named for Toby Devan Lewis, who died in 2022 but was an avid supporter of the New Museum before that and pledged $20 million toward the expansion.