A rendering of the New Museum’s expansion. Courtesy of the New Museum

We expected it to open last fall. Then came months of silence. Now, at last, the delayed reopening of the New Museum has an official date: March 21. The 60,000-square-foot expansion—designed by OMA (Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas) in collaboration with executive architect Cooper Robertson—will integrate seamlessly with the existing SANAA-designed flagship on the Bowery at Prince Street. The project doubles the museum’s exhibition space and dramatically enhances accessibility and circulation through three new elevators, a sweeping Atrium Stair and a redesigned entrance plaza—first revealed by the museum’s artistic director, Massimiliano Gioni, in an earlier interview with Observer. The expansion also adds major new public spaces, including an enlarged seventh-floor Sky Room and a 74-seat Forum for talks and events. On the ground floor, visitors will enter through an expanded lobby with a larger bookstore and a full-service restaurant operated by the Oberon Group.

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When we spoke to Gioni, he shared plans for the reopening exhibition, “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” which brings together more than 150 artists, writers, scientists, architects and filmmakers in an ambitious, cross-disciplinary, cross-generational, encyclopedic presentation—very much in

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