Photo: Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Jason O’Rear

In New York, the fresh ripens into the antique at formidable speed. Sanaa’s New Museum opened on Bowery in 2007, and under a decade later, it already needed more space. After multiple delays and a two-year closure, the museum is reopening with a redesign by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. It’s a work of radical respect, honoring the idiosyncrasies of the original while letting it breathe. Sanaa’s principals, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, may conceivably have mixed feelings about seeing their formerly unconventional creation so lovingly protected and at the same time transformed, as if it were 200 years old instead of 19. But the public unambiguously benefits.

The museum’s first purpose-built home looked like a factory for manufacturing dreams, a tough and exuberant stack of metal-clad boxes so intent on artistic labor that it didn’t even have the time to straighten itself out. Squeezed into a tight lot, it delighted in the drama of verticality. The galleries got smaller and the ceilings loftier as you climbed, so the 27-foot-high fourth-floor gallery felt grand but constrained, as if it had outgrown its container. A long, narrow stairway at the back connected galleries and passed a secret sculpture niche — a rejection of the usual grand lobbies and ceremonial staircases. It was, rather, the institutional equivalent of a speakeasy: Psst, come see some art.

Now the museum has expanded sideways, growing a separate but connected neighbor. OMA’s addition has a split personality: a crystal shard on the street, seamlessly sturdy galleries at the back. As you walk east down Prince Street where it dead-ends at Bowery, the new structure appears to be leaning against the off-kilter tower. The precarious dance echoes Frank Gehry’s sinuous “Fred and Ginger” Building in Prague, only with straight edges, sharp corners, and angled facets instead of continuous curves. Gehry and his collaborator, Vlado Milunic, designed those paired structures together; here, the younger partner gives its companion a shot of rejuvenating playfulness.

The New Museum, with the Sanaa original on the left and OMA’s addition on the right, gives Prince Street a dramatic terminus at Bowery.
Photo: Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Jason Keen

The new addition leans into the 2007 building for a kiss, then pulls away again at the top, answering Sanaa’s cubes with OMA’s triangles.
Photo: Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Jason O’Rear

The lean is an illusion created by the street wall folding back to open up a plaza for outdoor sculpture. (The first commission, by Sarah Lucas, will be installed later this spring.) Behind the taut skin, a showy staircase curls up through the atrium, and from the street, the angled railings resemble tilting floors. The structure projects spectacle and deference at the same time, keeping its distance at the bottom, coming in for a kiss upstairs, and then pulling flirtatiously away again at the top. The message is vintage OMA: Look at me looking at you.

The firm, co-founded by Rem Koolhaas and led in New York by one of his partners, Shohei Shigematsu, continues that play of personalities indoors. As you climb the staircase, you can see through the addition’s glass walls how thoroughly the boxy forms and rasplike surface of the original have embedded themselves into the streetscape. The old design infiltrates the new one, too: Sanaa’s industrial-gauge steel mesh thins out to an almost invisible steel netting sandwiched between panes of glass, giving OMA’s façade a hazy shimmer. Artworks burrow into the architecture. The museum has commissioned a hanging garden of artificial moss by Klára Hosnedlová that drops through the staircase’s central void. On the second floor, as part of “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” the complex’s inaugural exhibition, Tishan Hsu has papered the landing wall with a woozy topography of fleshlike pixels and mysterious close-ups of human orifices (mostly noses and ears, I think?).

Klára Hosnedlová’s four-story-high Shelter hangs in the center of the circling staircase.
Photo: Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Jason O’Rear

Step out of the light-filled atrium and into the windowless galleries, and the tension between new and sort of old disappears. The addition doubles the gallery space (to 20,000 square feet), but the only sign you’re passing from one building to the other is an extra-thick wall. That sleight of hand allows curators to divide each floor in multiple ways and decide how continuous, or not, an exhibition should be. All the rooms have the same corrugated metal ceilings resting on white steel beams, the same concrete floors. Warehouse chic was already a contemporary-art gallery cliché 20 years ago, but OMA was wise not to force an upgrade on a design that explicitly rejected sleekness.

Sanaa assembled boxes of different sizes, so OMA did the same in reverse: The larger the old gallery, the smaller its added companion. That tight, extra-tall room on the fourth floor now flows into a long, open ballroom. It’s the kind of neutral playground that curators covet, and Massimiliano Gioni and his team know how to use the space. Step out of the elevator, and you’re in a hall populated by robots and automatons squawking, jiggling, and hanging over a doorway as if each had suffered a different malfunction en route to world domination. Here, too, what was once pioneering and portentous already looks quaint. A couple of oversize flying jellyfish sculptures by Anicka Yi twirl around the gallery, up near the ceiling, in an automated aerial waltz.

The high-ceilinged fourth-floor gallery is populated by an assortment of fantastical robots.
Photo: Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Jason Keen/

The 2007 building presented itself as a machine for expressing humanity through art; the reopening show ventures into the border zone where person meets machine. “New Humans” expands into every available square inch with uncanny timing. Out in the implausible real world, desert server farms scan human knowledge to repackage it into easily digestible answers, self-guided drones blast away muscle and bone, and algorithms embedded in hearing aids determine what the world sounds like. Inside this building, generations of artists a century apart converse about similarly distressing and awe-inducing encounters between us and our technological creations.

OMA’s blue-hued public auditorium is tucked into the new tower’s peak.
Photo: Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Jason O’Rear

The New Museum is a profoundly urban citizen, eccentrically embedded on its once legendarily disheveled street. Koolhaas sang the joys of juxtapositions in his 1978 book Delirious New York, and here his firm has cultivated a distinctively New York–y jangle of forms in which the utilitarian becomes the theatrical. The building added a few bathrooms along with the galleries, and they may help, but I suspect there will be lines to see the narrow sliver of a restroom with its cathedral ceiling, long yellow sink, and toilet with a Lower East Side view.

Gioni and his team have been around long enough to have seen (and helped) the area transform, and they’ve thought about what kind of city they inhabit. When Yi’s jellyfish are aloft, they look down on an astonishing array of fantasies: drawings from Hugh Ferriss’s darkly imaginative 1929 book The Metropolis of Tomorrow; every page of Hariton Pushwagner’s Soft City, the late-1960s graphic novel that narrates a day in the life of a generic family in a Corbusian nightmare of highways and high-rises; Bodys Isek Kingelez’s imaginary tropical megalopolis built from paper; Constant Nieuwenhuys’s 1950s models of intricately mysterious structures hovering over multilayered landscapes.

Anicka Yi’s jellyfish drones overfly Bodys Isek Kingelez’s paper Ghost Town.
Photo: Exhibition view: New Humans: Memories of the Future, 2026. New Museum, New York. Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni

OMA almost seems to have anticipated that array of unreal places, crowning the building with a collection of spaces that look imaginary but aren’t: a digital fabrication lab jammed with the latest in creative robotics, a dream of an artist’s studio. Above the galleries, where the new towerlet leans back and tilts its face to the sun, the firm has built a three-dimensional puzzle out of triangular pieces. A steeply raked, blue-tinted auditorium cascades to a three-cornered window, so you can sit on the steps and feel as if you’re parachuting onto the Bowery. The high magenta walls of an outdoor terrace drop down and meet at a lookout point, creating an elevated cloister reminiscent of Luis Barragán.

Up there, away from the public’s eye, artists will work and meet and make and teach. But instead of treating those rooms as back of house, OMA packed them into the peak of a short skyscraper, elevating them into sunlit incubators of deliberate delirium poised above the everyday.

A magenta-walled triangular terrace aims the eye at the World Trade Center.
Photo: Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Jason O’Rear

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If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the March 23, 2026, issue of
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