Art museum breaks ground on new Bowery home.The board of trustees board of trustees Politics The posse of thugs who oversee an institution's administration. See Board of directors. of the New Museum of Contemporary Art This article is about New Museum of Contemporary Art. For other Museums named Museum of Contemporary Art, see Museum of Contemporary Art. The New Museum of Contemporary Art hosted a groundbreaking ceremony on October 11 to launch construction of its much-anticipated new building on the Bowery Bowery Manhattan district, once notorious for brothels and gambling halls. [Am. Hist.: Hart, 97] See : Debauchery . Designed by the acclaimed Tokyo-based firm of Sejima and Nishizawa/ SANAA, the new 60,000 s/f, seven-story Museum will be the first art museum building constructed in downtown Manhattan in over a century. The Museum will rise on the site of what is currently a parking lot at 235 Bowery, between Stanton and Rivington Streets, where several of the city's most distinctive communities meet. A dramatic stack of rectangular boxes shifted off axis in different directions, dressed in silvery metal cladding The plastic or glass sheath that is fused to and surrounds the core of an optical fiber. The cladding's mirror-like coating keeps the light waves reflected inside the core. The cladding is covered with a protective outer jacket. See fiber optics glossary. and punctuated by skylights and windows offering views of the city, the building will feature flexible, column-free exhibition spaces, a 188-seat theater, a sun-flooded lobby bookstore, expanded classrooms, a library and study center, a cafe and rooftop terraces. The New Museum is scheduled to open to the public in late 2007, in conjunction with the institution's 30th anniversary. In the interim, the Museum is occupying a temporary exhibition space at 556 W. 22nd St. in Chelsea. The new building will be among several international arts-related landmarks designed by Sejima and Nishizawa, including the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, the Glass Pavilion of the Toledo Museum of Art The Toledo Museum of Art is an internationally known art museum located in the Old West End neighborhood of Toledo, Ohio, United States. The museum was founded by Toledo glassmaker Edward Drummond Libbey in 1901, and moved to its present location, a Greek revival building designed in Ohio (to be completed spring 2006) and the Institute of Modern Art of Valencia in Spain (to be completed 2007). The New Museum building is the centerpiece of a $50 million-plus capital project that includes construction of the SANAA design, significant expansion of the institution's endowment and other costs related to planned growth. "Downtown Manhattan has been home to generations of artists in every discipline from around the world," said Saul Dennison, president of the board of trustees of the New Museum. "Their ideas, energy and discoveries have always been central to the very identity of New York City New York City: see New York, city. New York City City (pop., 2000: 8,008,278), southeastern New York, at the mouth of the Hudson River. The largest city in the U.S. , and are more relevant and urgent today than ever. With this building on the Bowery, the Bowery, the (bou`ərē, –`rē) [Dutch Bouwerie=farm], section of lower Manhattan, New York City. The Bowery, the street that gives the area its name, was once a road to the farm of New Amsterdam Governor Peter Stuyvesant, who is New Museum of Contemporary Art aspires to make a contribution to both the built landscape of our city and New York's continued pre-eminence as a global cultural capital, open to all people and forms of expression." Lisa Phillips, Henry Luce Noun 1. Henry Luce - United States publisher of magazines (1898-1967) Henry Robinson Luce, Luce III director of the New Museum, said, "It is fitting that after 28 years of presenting contemporary art, we are now creating a museum building whose design is commensurate with our program." |
|
||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion