This building, which appeared in the last "slum" area of Manhattan - on Bowery Street, was eagerly awaited. In the central part of the island, there have been no museums built from scratch since the middle of the 20th century, when the Guggenheim Wright Museum appeared first in 1959, and then the Whitney Marcel Breuer Gallery in 1966. The SANAA project connects a common compositional solution with this last monument of modernism: Japanese the architects also challenged the force of gravity by making the upper part emphatically unstable, outweighing the base. Such allusions are fully justified from a historical point of view: the first director of the New Museum, Marsha Tucker, founded it after leaving the Whitney Gallery, where she curated, in the opinion of the management, exhibitions that were too bold.
This December, the New Museum of Contemporary Art turns 30, and the opening of the new building was intended to be a gift for this anniversary.
The uncompromising program of this institute, which shows only the newest and freshest, at the same time - often the most radical, provocative, and also not always highly artistic of everything that appears in the field of contemporary US art, was reflected in the choice of the construction site, as well as in some aspects of the project. Bowery Street is lined with wholesale food shops serving restaurants and doesn't look very respectable. Therefore, the construction of a museum there should have shown indifference to "bourgeois values". But it is his appearance there that contributes to the gradual rise in property prices, which could in five years turn this part of the city into a fashionable residential area for the wealthy bohemians, as happened with other "unkempt" places in Manhattan.
The environment set a certain tone for the work of architects. SANAA are known for their subtle, perfectionist designs, such as the recently opened Glass Pavilion of the Toledo Museum. Here, the new building gives the impression of a reconstructed factory: this was influenced both by the choice of materials and the approach to their processing. The walls of the structure, which resemble a stack of six huge boxes, were originally supposed to be lined with steel panels, but it turned out that in the New York smog they quickly lose their appearance due to dirt. As a result, the museum is now clad with aluminum panels covered with aluminum mesh, which is usually used in road construction. Depending on the lighting, the building looks either milky white or dark gray, but always - thanks to the grid - slightly "blurred" along the contour. The windows are practically invisible: there really are almost no windows, the only exception is the glazing strip in the educational center on the fifth floor. Glass also plays the role of a wall on the first floor of the building, making the lobby, open to all, clearly visible from the street, and at night turning into a "pillow of light" on which the 50-meter building rests.
Inside, visitors will find a must-see for a modern museum, a café, a bookstore, and a small exhibition hall. In the basement there is a black box theater, but its walls, contrary to usual, are painted white. Above the lobby there are three floors of galleries with different ceiling heights - from 5 to 7 m, otherwise they are classic minimalist spaces for exhibiting works of art, with whitewashed walls and ceilings, floors filled with concrete (already covered with cracks, as the architects intended) and fluorescent lamps. Due to the arrangement of individual building blocks with an offset relative to each other in all halls, it was possible to make glazing sections in the floors; however, they are covered with translucent plastic panels, which significantly alter the quality of natural light. Steel beams of the building's frame also became an element of the interior, which SANAA placed at the same distance from each other above the head of the visitors: for the sake of such regularity, adjustments had to be made to the structure of the building.
On the fifth floor there is an educational center, on the sixth - the administration premises, on the seventh - a multifunctional hall for social events. The eighth floor - a "box" without a roof - serves to accommodate technical equipment.
SANAA seems to be deliberately pushing away from the impersonal elegance and neutrality of Yoshio Taniguchi's new MOMA building, where architecture has all but disappeared, making artwork the only significant aspect of the museum. At the same time, despite the deliberately rude, "own" appearance (the idea of using aluminum mesh for wall cladding came to Sejima and Nishizawa, in particular, also because American workers, as a rule, who work worse than European and Japanese workers, do not could handle the more capricious material they needed) and "industrial" exhibition spaces with rows of fluorescent lamps and concrete floors, the architects nevertheless created a similar atmosphere of sterility and impersonality, which is not only unfriendly towards works of art, but, on the contrary, deprives them of their vital energy, expressiveness, which is especially important for the works of young artists, outsider artists, which are mainly shown by the New Museum of Contemporary Art.
