TATLIN NEWS #44

An extrAVAGAnt introVert | new york City, the UsA | sAnAA | new Museum | pho- to by © Dean Kaufman | text by eugenia Ba- khturova The New Museum founded in 1977 is now considered to be one of the leading contem- porary art institutions in New York City: inter- national projects and a hall dedicated to dig- ital projects and experimental video attract a great number of viewers. The director of the museum said that, «In keeping with the New Museum’s mission and spirit, we have chosen a younger (!) firm that, while not yet well known (!) in the United States, is quite es- tablished in architecture». This competent bu- reau designed the first separate building for this museum (earlier it took three floors of As- tor Building in SoHo). These days because of fewer free sites more reconstruction than new construction is being done, but this time Seji- ma and Nishizawa brought Japanese harmony to the American land in full. According to Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa a perfect museum can be perceived as a combination of exhibition spaces of bal- anced proportions, which would be connected through convenient passages for circulation. In the environment of dense development in New York and particularly in Manhattan, the ar- chitects decided that the building should have an introverted character, because the beauty of splashes of light on huge windows on the fifth floor cannot probably be appreciated, and then, the building had to be visually detached from the borders of the site. And should the object come out monolithic, it will provide for better operations in the urban environment. According to SANAA, creating boxes that are shifted against each other will ensure their efficient communication with the surround- ing development. Therefore the importance of cladding is equal to that one of structural de- sign in this project; the cladding will have to provide for the monolithic volume, and a kind of transparency, since the required amount of daylight should still enter the building. Even- tually a mesh of galvanized, zinc-plated steel,

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