New Museum To Offer Free General Admission Tours Celebrating SANAA 5/19
By: Gabrielle Sierra May. 06, 2010
On Wednesday, May 19, from noon to 6 p.m., the New Museum will offer free general admission and tours in honor of Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of the Tokyo-based firm SANAA, architects of the New Museum on the Bowery and the 2010 Laureates of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. Sejima is the second woman to receive this honor and Nishizawa, at forty-three years old, is the youngest winner in Pritzker history.
Several tours focusing on the New Museum's building will be scheduled and hosted by architecture experts, many of whom were on the building's original core architecture team, including Jonas Elding, Florian Idenburg, and Toshihiro Oki, among others. The Museum will also open the seventh-floor Sky Room (usually open on Saturday and Sundays only) to allow visitors the opportunity to experience the whole building and panoramic views of the Bowery. SANAA will be awarded the Pritzker Prize in a ceremony on Ellis Island on May 17.
"We are pleased to open our doors for free for locals and tourists alike in celebration of SANAA and their design for the New Museum. SANAA's stacked, shifting boxes reflect the nature of contemporary art and Bowery neighborhood as open, dynamic, and ever-changing," said Lisa Phillips, Toby Devan Lewis Director. "It is remarkable that this storied neighborhood, with historic highs and lows now has concentrations of buildings by four Pritzker Prize-winning architects: Norman Foster (257 Bowery), Thom Mayne (41 Cooper Union at Bowery), Herzog & de Meuron (40 Bond Street at Bowery), and SANAA's New Museum."
The purpose of the Pritzker Architecture Prize is to annually honor a living architect whose built work demonstrates a combination of those qualities of talent, vision, and commitment, which has produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture.
About the New Museum
Founded in 1977, the New Museum is the first and only museum in New York City dedicated to contemporary art. The museum is a premiere destination for new art and new ideas both in New York and beyond, with a curatorial program recognized in the United States for its global scope and adventurousness. The New Museum on the Bowery is the first art museum constructed from the ground up in downtown Manhattan and is SANAA's first building in New York.
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