New home for the Museum of Contemporary Art

The New Museum of Contemporary Art, founded in New York in 1977, has moved to a new home in downtown Manhattan. It opened its doors to the public last December, coinciding with the institution’s 30th anniversary.
The premier contemporary art museum in New York City and among the most important internationally, the New Museum exhibits innovative contemporary art from around the world, and offers public programmes, a unique bookstore and an extensive website.

The New Museum rises 174 feet above sea level. Visitors encounter the seven-storey building as a stack of seven rectangular, mismatched boxes on the verge of toppling over.

The aluminium-clad building, designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, founders of the Tokyo architectural firm Sanaa, was described by a writer in the New York Times as “a remarkably sensitive exploration of the relationship between art, architecture and the human beings who animate them.”

Say architects Sejima and Nishizawa, “Now we have a building that meets the city, allows natural light inside, gives the museum flexible column-free galleries, and expresses the programme and people inside to the world of New York outside.”

The main floor of the building is divided lengthwise into a lobby and a loading dock that will be visible from the street. The lobby is divided into a series of lively public zones, beginning with a ticket counter and cafe and culminating in a large glass-enclosed gallery. “At the New Museum, art, architecture, graphic design, film and the public will all jostle for attention,” says the New York Times writer. “Rarely, in today’s New York, does a building project inspire so much confidence in the future.”

Visitors who choose to ascend from the lobby level to the galleries above, can take an elevator or use one of the staircases situated in the building’s core. The architects have designed a fluid, three-level zone of extraordinary galleries on the second, third and fourth floors — all freed from columns by the structural support of the core.
In the galleries, the steel of the architecture is exposed with the diagonal structural beams of the exterior rendered white with their spray-on fireproofing material, “We want the building to show what it is,” Sanaa has stated. “This openness is consistent with the openness of the New Museum.” The structural steel makes frequent appearances throughout the building.

The fifth floor houses the institution’s new Education Centre, with classroom space, a video editing room, and a resource centre with computer stations. On the sixth floor are staff offices, kitchen, restrooms and meeting spaces. Here, windows wrap around the space on three sides, and polycarbonate sliding panels provide privacy.
On the seventh floor of the building, the New Museum offers one of the most arresting multipurpose spaces in downtown Manhattan, the Toby Devan Lewis Sky Room. On this level, an eleven-foot-high, 2,000-square-foot space for events and special programmes features floor-to-ceiling glass, offering panoramic vistas of the city and an outdoor terrace that runs without interruption around the east and south sides of the building.

Reflecting upon the completed building, five years from initial conception to completion, Sanaa comments, “The New Museum is intriguing because it is always asking questions, and we hope that it continues to do so. Our building is an attempt to express the New Museum’s adventurousness and freedom.”

Museu Oscar Niemeyer -‘Museum of the eye’ —Brazil’s pride

A popular cultural institution of international significance completed recently in Latin America is the Oscar Niemeyer Museum in the city of Curitiba, southern Brazil. Named after ‘The world’s greatest living architect’, it focusses on the visual arts, architecture and design.

The museum was inaugurated in 2002 as Novo Museu, or New Museum. After remodelling and the construction of a new annexe, it was reinaugurated in July 2003 as Museu Oscar Niemeyer — Portuguese for Oscar Niemeyer Museum — in honour of the famous Brazilian architect who completed this project at 95 years of age. (On December 15, 2007, Niemeyer turned 100.) The museum is also known as Museu do Olho, or Museum of the Eye, because of the design of the building.

The museum complex of two buildings, in an area of 35,000 square metres (of which 19,000 square metres is dedicated to exhibition space), is a true example of architecture allied with art. The first building was designed by Oscar Niemeyer in 1967, faithful to the style of the time and conceived as an educational institution. It was later remodelled and adapted to function as a museum, for which Niemeyer designed the annexe, reminiscent of an eye, imprinting it with a new characteristic identity.

The museum features many of Niemeyer’s signature elements — bold geometric forms, sinuous ramps for pedestrians, large areas of white painted concrete, and areas with vivid murals or paintings. It is located within a garden designed by the landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx in a large expanse of woodland.

Oscar Niemeyer, who was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1907, not only designed some of the most admired and beautiful buildings of the past 70 years, but has “lived and breathed architecture as few others have, and who has outlived his contemporaries,” said a writer recently in the British newspaper, The Guardian. The writer, Jonathan Glancey, described him as “a living legend” and “arguably the world’s greatest living architect”.

As a student working in the office of Lucio Costa, a prominent architect, Niemeyer was assigned to work on the plans of the Brazilian Ministry of Public Instruction designed by the famous Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier. It was while working on this project that he met the Mayor of Brazil’s wealthiest central state, Juscelino Kubitschek, who was later to become President of Brazil. As President, he appointed Niemeyer to be the chief architect of the new capital of Brasilia, a project which occupied all of his time for many years.

Also in Brazil, Niemeyer designed an Aeronautical Research Centre near Sao Paulo, and a Museum of Modern Art at Niteroi (as an abstract circular form above the landscape).

Among Niemeyer’s other world projects, he collaborated with Le Corbusier and some others on the design for the United Nations headquarters in New York City, constructed of reinforced concrete, glass curtain wall and aluminium exterior. In Europe, he designed an office building for the Renault car company and the Communist Party headquarters, both in Paris; a cultural centre for Le Havre, the port city in northern France; and office buildings in Milan and Turin, in Italy. In Algiers, the seaport capital of Algeria (North Africa), he designed the Zoological Gardens and the Foreign Office.

Oscar Niemeyer shared the 1988 Pritzker Prize for architecture with Gordon Bunshaft of the United States. A member of the Brazilian Communist Party since 1945, Niemeyer was presented with the Lenin Peace Prize in 1963. On his 100th birthday, Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, awarded him the Order of Friendship.