New New Museum

TBD

Slightly unfinished and sharp around the edges, the New Museum recently opened a new, OMA-designed extension to their existing gallery space, originally designed by SANAA. The extension was met with some criticism (although it is important to note that most people on this earth don't concern themselves with such trivial obsessions). I biked down the Bowery to inspect the scene—did the extension really ruin the purity of SANAA’s work?

The seven-story equivalent of a Cybertruck has found parking between a stack of minimalist boxes and a homeless shelter. Across the street you can buy wholesale commercial kitchen appliances from an Italian restaurant depot. The public space in front of the building was walled off, not that you would necessarily want to congregate there anyway. The triangle of space consists of nothing but bare concrete; it feels cold and sad. OMA cannot be accused of designing anti-homeless architecture; they simply designed anti-human architecture. A gutter yet to be installed sat alone at the center of the triangular plaza with “New Museum 2” written on its side. I entered the museum (you can get in for free by presenting a physical press pass card and asking for a press ticket) and went straight to the stair- case. There was something about it that felt a lot like a fire escape, if a fire escape was wearing an iPad and not perceived as potentially life threatening. The exposed structure sits lightly masked by a not-so-nice-to- touch perforated metal sheathing, edges left unsanded. The abutting wall to the museum, left as raw concrete blocks, is painted with metallic silver paint just like every architecture model I see around the studio (including my own).

The verdict: Have you walked down the Bowery in the middle of summer and felt the heat warp your brain’s electro-chemistry? The new New Museum will be pumped with cold, dehumidified air, and when you walk inside to escape the suffocating hellscape of the Bowery, your neurotransmitters will return to busi- ness as usual. The OMA extension stumbled into the museum, just like you, with its own clever heat induced hallucinations in a sweaty and smelly physical state. Nonetheless, the museum has returned to its normative (and improved) intellectual function.