New York’s New Museum has a new extension. Designed by Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) with executive architect Cooper Robertson, the expansion addresses the institution’s desire for increased capacity to host its growing public programme.

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Jason Keen, Jason O’Rear

Following a decade of development and two-year closure, the museum reopened to the public at the end of March, 2026, showcasing in the process one of the only examples of the combined work of two living Pritzker Prize-wining architects (Koolhaas with Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA).

“It’s not simply an extension, but a complement, a counterpart,” announced OMA co-founder Rem Koolhaas in a video address, speaking of the response to SANAA’s original design for the New Museum, unveiled in 2007.

OMA’s 60,000 square foot addition sensitively adjoins its counterpart, aligning its stacked floors with the same heights as the original offset boxes. Doing so allows for continuous horizontal circulation between the new and the old, with galleries and social areas spanning both, improving flexibility in how they can be programmed or separated.

As Manhattan’s only dedicated contemporary art museum, the New Museum has served as a vital platform for dialogue between art and the public since its founding in 1977. For its expansion, a new 74-seat forum has been introduced alongside the enlarged seventh-floor Sky Room, offering views across Lower Manhattan a la OMA’s Casa da Musica in Porto.

Like its predecessor, the new New Museum also incorporates a series of setbacks, forming terraces that visitors ascend to through an atrium stair and three additional elevators. Deeper in the block and lower than the SANAA building, the expansion remains distinct, with an oblique, steep recess at ground level and a deep setback above. While opposing the rectilinear volumes of the SANAA building, the shifting floor plan also ensures that spaces enjoy natural light from above, with gallery spaces carefully controlled for lighting.

From the street-level entrance plaza – up through three floors of expansive galleries designed to accommodate curatorial variety, and up to diversely functioning terraced spaces – the building’s façade reveals the range of activities taking place within. Gathering, exchange and creation, are all made visible through a layered façade of laminated glass and metal mesh, which unifies with the museum’s existing white anodised aluminium cladding to create a continuous succession of surfaces and a transparency of circulation.

Arriving at the intersection of Bower and Prince Street, OMA has expanded the bookstore and restaurant within the lobby, forming a closer and more inviting connection to the street. Upper floors have also now become home to the museum’s “cultural incubator”, NEW INC. and feature studios dedicated to artists-in-residence.

“The façade reveals the circulation and inner workings of the museum making visible the diversity of activities happening inside,” said partner-in-charge of OMA’s New York office, Shohei Shigematsu. “At night, the building becomes almost like a lantern exposing its inner life to the city.”

ARUP provided structural engineering and MEP design across the integrated building, supporting clarity in the circulation strategy through a complex truss structure and a geometrically intricate central stair. Crucially, the staircase was maintained as a continuous architectural element through an innovative fire-protection approach. By incorporating concealed voids above the perforated ceiling to accommodate smoke and heat accumulation, the design allows the stair to occupy and define the full height of the atrium at the building’s core.

The first exhibition hosted within the extension is the returning, New Humans: Memories of the Future, which will span across the entire new expansion, bringing together more than 200 artists, writers, scientists, architects, and filmmakers. Alongside this, the museum will be presenting a series of major new commissions integrated throughout the building. This includes a façade work by Tschabalala Self, as part of the ongoing Façade Sculpture Programme, and a monumental textile-based sculpture by Klára Hosnedlová, commissioned for the museum’s new atrium stair.

“Since our founding nearly 50 years ago, the New Museum has been a home for the most groundbreaking art of today and a haven for the artists who make it,” said Lisa Phillips, Toby Devan Lewis Director of the New Museum. “Our new 120,000 sq ft building on the Bowery signals our redoubled commitment to new art and new ideas, and to the museum as an ever-evolving site for risk-taking, collaboration, and experimentation.”

Shohei Shigematsu, at OMA continued: “The New Museum is an incubator for new cultural perspectives and production, and the expansion aims to embody that attitude of openness. Imagined as a highly connected yet distinct counterpart to the existing museum’s verticality and solidity, the new building will offer horizontally expansive galleries for curatorial variety, open vertical circulation, and a diversity of spaces for gathering, exchange, and creation. The building is further shaped to create an active public face—including an outdoor plaza at the ground, moments of transparency throughout the central atrium, and terraced openings at the top—that will openly engage the surrounding community and beyond.”

“Marking our first public building in New York City, the project with the New Museum is especially meaningful – an institution whose forward-thinking ethos we have long admired,” added Koolhaas. “Building on past collaborations with Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, it has been a privilege to engage in dialogue with their original building, one of the most resonant works of architecture in the city. The completed project stands as both a continuation and an expansion of that legacy.”

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