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- Review: The New Museum’s midlife crisis
Review: The New Museum’s midlife crisis
Instead of a Porsche, the once-scrappy institution has treated itself, as it nears its 50th birthday, to a sleek and pricey (if shoddy!) Koolhaas; in lieu of collecting artworks, it seems to be collecting buildings
Christopher Hawthorne
March 20, 2026
SANAA meets OMA on the Bowery
What’s the difference between a punch list item (heyo!) and a more fundamental, and tougher to fix, construction error?
What does it mean for a building to open too early and decidedly too late, to feel both rushed and overcooked?
Why is that building attracting so much boilerplate praise from so many establishment art and architecture critics, despite its reliance on a long list of museum-design clichés and its overall janky-ness?
Has the bar for new architecture in New York City really slipped so low?
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