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Risks and rewards on the Bowery: in which the new New Museum of Contemporary Art is viewed as an urbanistic success with somewhat less happy consequences for the galleries inside

Art in America, April, 2008 by Joseph Giovannini

With museum architecture nearly a blood sport in today's heated cultural climate, the advent of a new museum in Manhattan ranks as a banner event. Few museum buildings have been more avidly anticipated than the new New Museum of Contemporary Art, which opened this December on the Bowery, just east of SoHo. It is the museum's first stand-alone structure in its nomadic 30 years.

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Having positioned itself in the art world as an incubator for emerging artists, the New Museum specializes in risk. In 2002, true to its mission of championing the new and unknown, the museum invited a group of architects at the younger, more experimental end of the international spectrum to enter a competition to design its new home. Long a denizen of lofts, the museum would be stepping into the major leagues with a 60,000-square-foot building that inevitably would define the museum visually, and potentially embody and even reveal its character. The new structure would address the street, the skyline and the public beyond the museum's audience. The building would be much more than a container of objects, and would itself become the most conspicuous object belonging to a museum that only recently began collect.

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The first risk was siting the building mid-block in a part of Manhattan still smarting from its lingering identification as New York's skid row. The building is likely to change all that. Amid a motley array of lackluster brick structures, a crisp, fresh, seven-story tower by the Tokyo-based firm Sanaa now rises 175 feet. While its graceless neighbors are captive to gravity, gathering mass as they eventuate at the ground, the New Museum is clad in a skin of expanded metal that dissolves the building's mass. Unlike most high-rises, the building was not conceived as an extrusion from the ground plane, but was designed as a stack of shifted blocks which form a stepped profile. Despite its resulting iconic presence--its profile offers a new interpretation in miniature of the skyscraper--it opens up at street level with a glass storefront facade that fits right into the fabric of the neighborhood and the rhythm of the surrounding shops. The glass front allows passersby to check out the interior as it channels the energy of downtown street life inside.

Lifted inches off the building's enclosure walls, the expanded metal skin acts as an enigmatic veil that takes on different appearances in different lights-from solid and opaque to shining, diaphanous and even atmospheric--seeming, at times, almost an emanation. The structure belongs to that rare category of buildings that change character and mood with changes in the weather.

The museum world is overcrowded with buildings pretending to simplicity but achieving only a strained and stiff formality. Sanaa's design, instead, really is simple in the best sense, and from the front door, the simplicity transcends itself, becoming an attitude that correctly reflects the area's history of lofts in which artists lived and worked, long before they became the dwellings du jour for hedge funders.

Everything here is direct, fresh and stated without elaboration. In the lobby, a fence of inexpensive expanded metal corrals the bookstore. Fluorescent lights hang (a la Dan Flavin) in full view, softened a tad by a scrim of expanded metal (a la Robert Irwin). The steel beams are exposed and expressed, along with the corrugated metal ceiling deck that supports the floor above. As in any true Manhattan loft building, the construction reads clearly and frankly, without being coy. At the back of the lobby, completing the ground floor behind a wall of glass, is a gallery exposed at a distance to the street, a metaphor of transparency that makes a pitch to passing pedestrians.

Transparency, however, shifts to opacity as the visit to the upstairs galleries begins. The elevators are among the slowest in town. Access from one level to the next is achieved more expeditiously through the tight fire stair, or a long, narrow, quizzical stairway funneling between the third- and fourth-floor galleries. Ascending by one means or another, you suddenly understand the shifted blocks of the exterior silhouette. Each of the first three blocks in the stack is a gallery. Higher cubes house the library, administrative offices and an events room with panoramic views and a terrace. The galleries are similar inside except for subtle changes in height and square footage. Each is a closed, self-contained volume.

Verticality in a museum presents the classic problem of curatorial continuity between galleries, and the museum pays a high price inside for the exterior clarity of the shifted cubes. Having committed to the stepped boxes, the architects have failed to break the box inside, and the galleries fail to open to each other for smooth and elegant transitions. The boxy design works against any curatorial continuity between floors.

Even an exhibition that occupies all three floors--as in the first show, "Unmonumental" [see article, this issue]--seems to be three different shows. The spatial organization works against relating parts of the show. Had the architects positioned the elevator core at the back of the museum rather than to the side, they might have cleared enough space in front to offer circulation alternatives. Ramps or terraces might have facilitated a more continuous promenade.

Risks and rewards on the Bowery: in which the new New Museum of Contemporary Art is viewed as an urbanistic success with somewhat less happy consequences for the galleries inside

Art in America, April, 2008 by Joseph Giovannini

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