Last week “SANAA: Works 1998-2008” opened in SANAA’s recently completed New Museum on the Bowery in New York. The exhibition is the first overview of their work in New York and provides an opportunity for the public to see the new New Museum in the context of SANAA’s practice and achievements.

The exhibition will take the form of an environment rather than a traditional exhibition, exploring Sejima and Nishizawa’s vision of the Museum lobby as, in their words, “a kind of constantly animated public-private living room where visitors can look, eat, read, shop, discover, and reflect among new art and new ideas.”
With “SANAA: Works 1998-2008,” Sejima and Nishizawa present new cultural, educational, commercial, and residential commissions completed in the last decade as well as projects under development and prototypes for new design objects, all in a garden-like atmosphere punctuated by trees, plants, and furniture woven throughout the installation. Models, sketches, prototypes, and domestic objects representing many projects and clients will be included, as will early designs and models for the New Museum, all being exhibited for the first time in New York. The installation will be on view in the glass-walled Lobby Gallery, and extend into the New Museum’s Marcia Tucker Hall.
SANAA’s work embraces qualities of light and lightness, transparency and openness as well as fluid, nonhierarchical space; the use of exterior façades as permeable membranes establishes relationships between interior and exterior, individual and community, and the realms of public and private experience.
On a macro level, objects in the exhibition highlight these relationships and design elements through models ¬from retail and commercial building projects such as the Christian Dior Building Omotesando, Tokyo, Japan (2001-2003) and Vitrashop Factory Hall, Basel, Switzerland (2006—); domestic architecture like House in a Plum Grove, Tokyo, Japan (2001-2003) and Flower House, Suiza, Switzerland (2006—); and cultural projects including the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Ishikawa, Japan (1998-2004); the Zollverein School of Management and Design, Essen, Germany (2003—); EPFL Learning Center, Lausanne, Switzerland (2004—); the Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art in Toledo, Ohio (2001-2006); New Museum, New York (2003-2007); and the highly anticipated Louvre-Lens, France (2005—). The visual conversation between these building designs and more micro-level designs will be further drawn out through the display of prototypes, furniture, and housewares that complement the building projects. Among the already existing SANAA-designed tables and scattering of Rabbit Chairs (2005) designed for the New Museum’s café will be a model of SANAA’s Flower Chair (2001); a set of Alessi Tea & Coffee Towers (2000-2007); and a Hanahana (FlowerFlower) stand (2000) with fresh flowers.

The exhibition will be on view through June 15, 2008.

find more pictures of the museum at DETAILplus