The New Museum of Contemporary Art is an eight-story, nine-level unique structure located in Lower Manhattan, New York City. The first fine art museum ever constructed from the ground up in downtown Manhattan, the New Museum opened to the public in December of 2007.
Since, the New Museum building has offered a home for contemporary art and an incubator for new ideas, as well as an architectural contribution to New York’s urban landscape. The Museum is a combination of elegant and urban, adding life and verve to New York’s new Lower East Side.
The Museum building rises 174-feet above street level and appears as a dramatic stack of six rectangular boxes. The distinctive architectural form of the building derives directly from the site itself. The anti-establishment museum sits in a scruffy-but-gentrifying part of town and exudes an urban elegance one would be hard-pressed to find anywhere else.
The interior of the Museum is as non-conformist and contemporary as the exterior. With 15-foot tall clear plate glass windows, and a color palette of stark white and aluminum, visitors will be drawn to the luminous, pale space, full of daylight washing a palette of white and silver.
Bisazza’s Hanami Arancio (orange) and Hanami Azzurro (blue) mosaic patterns provide one of the few touches of color apparent in the Museum.
Bisazza Hanami mosaic covers the walls of Museum restrooms with hotly hued, pixilated Hanami cherry blossom patterns – the only intensely colored feature in the building aside from the vibrant green elevator cab interiors.
The pattern is designed by world-renowned Carlo Dal Bianco and takes its name from the traditional Japanese festival of cherry blossom, as he depicts large black and white cherry blossoms blooming on blue and orange backdrops.
