Just off the jet from Tokyo, Ryue Nishizawa ambles up the Bowery, a little bleary-eyed. It's mid-July, and the opening date for the New Museum's new home—the most high-profile American project yet for Sanaa, the architecture firm he runs with Kazuyo Sejima in Japan—has been set for December 1, but not announced. Everyone is hedging just a bit while the concrete shell of what New Yorkers have been calling "a stack of boxes" gets the finishes that should turn it into one of the most exciting museum buildings in the city since the 1959 debut of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim.
And it's a mess. Hoses run up and down the stairs, classic rock thunders from plaster-splattered boom boxes, and the distinctive siding that will make the mostly windowless exterior walls come alive has only now arrived. Stacks of expanded aluminum mesh like the stuff New York City's garbage cans are made of—but big enough to have been used for roadbeds—are making it tricky to get around the space.
"New York is the hardest," Nishizawa says of his globe-trotting adventures in what's becoming a kind of parachute architecture (which includes stops at last year's Glass Pavilion in Toledo, Ohio, and an upcoming hotel in Bulgaria and Louvre satellite in Lens, France). "It's very dirty." His general on the ground on the Lower East Side, Florian Idenburg, elaborates for his taciturn boss: "In Japan, there's a much greater sense of collaboration with the builders and the architect, and that joint responsibility makes them have to become more innovative. Here, none of the different people working on a project want to have anything to do with each other—it's all liability worries." Nishizawa is wearing a large yellow T-shirt that seems almost a nod to Charlie Brown. In fact, if it weren't for his sun-worn face—deeply tanned from driving his vintage Alfa Romeo Spider around the Japanese countryside with the top down—he could be mistaken from 20 paces for a teenager.
Their innovations really become visible only on a second, less chaotic walk-through in September. The initial hype about the architect's attention to natural light seemed like standard museum lip service, but in fact a surprising luminescence not only pervades the galleries; it seems to change direction as the skylights set into the boxes' edges—made possible by the building's shifting setbacks—are configured differently on each floor. The ceiling of the second gallery, with skylights to the east and west, seems to hover—the kind of effect that gives this blocky tower improbable buoyancy.
The museum is built on a narrow lot and sits cheek by jowl with a string of wholesale restaurant suppliers (recently there was a bounty of used dough-retarders in front of a pizza-oven specialist). At street level, the stores' new neighbor is friendly and transparent—even the crating and uncrating of art will be visible from the sidewalk. Inside, the exposed mechanicals running along the ceilings provide a strong design tie to nearby SoHo, where the New Museum spent 22 years in a cast-iron loft building. The galleries feel tremendously spacious—the kind of vastness that should be able to temporarily stunt New Yorkers' knee-jerk calculations of price per square foot. The initial budget for the building was a mere $35 million—about the same amount, The New York Times has pointed out, that MoMA spent on its temporary home in Queens while its own new $850 million building was under construction. Yet Idenburg explains that, even beyond budget concerns, simplicity was a tactic for maximizing exhibition space. There's a core, with elevators and stairs, which does all the work of holding the building up, obviating the need for load-bearing walls or columns that might interrupt the visitor's gaze.
