I have started thinking of them as spaceships to nowhere. In my city, another one is always on the way; the latest touches down at 213 Bowery this fall. The last to arrive at that address, the SANAA-designed New Museum, was finished in 2007, the year of Obamamania and the iPhone and the first gentle rustling of the Great Recession. Like its predecessor, the new annex is a sleek, politely glowy object. It disrupts the skyline but not too much, making a statement but not too loudly. Designed by Rem Koolhaas and Shohei Shigematsu, it took three years to build, doubles the original floorspace, and cost something like sixty million dollars, or what Manhattan developers now call a “bargain.” The style is the kind still optimistically described as futuristic, though the reopening of a new New in 2025 is a reminder that this future is close to twenty years old, a throwback to a time when smart design and calm authority were still widely believed to be capable of saving the world. The first exhibition on the calendar is titled, too perfectly, “Memories of the Future.”
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence