Adjaye's Design for Harlem Museum Unveiled

As announced in July 2015, Adjaye's new building will replace the Studio Museum's current home, a more than 100-year-old building that was renovated by the late African-American architect J. Max Bond, Jr. into the museum's home in the early 1980s and by Rogers Marvel Architects two decades later. Adjaye Associates is working with New York's Cooper Robertson on the project.

Adjaye's 82,000-sf building will more than double the museum's current spaces for exhibiting art and hosting its artist-in-residence program. Furthermore, the larger building will provide more space for education, public programs, and public amenities, including presentations on the lower level, a welcome center, a café, and a roof terrace spanning the whole building. Galleries for temporary exhibitions and the display of the museum's permanent collection are located on three floors in the middle of the building.

Per a statement from the Studio Museum, "David Adjaye’s design provides the Studio Museum with a dynamic, sculptural facade that contrasts strongly with the surrounding commercial buildings. The building has a porous, welcoming presence at street level, a light-filled core that soars up through the entire interior, and a tiered public hall, which the architect has likened to an 'inverted stoop' that invites people to step down from the street into a multiuse space that will be free and open to the public during Museum hours and used for presentations and informal gatherings."

The Studio Museum in Harlem is located on 125th Street, a major thoroughfare in Manhattan's Harlem neighborhood. Although the goal was to finish the new building by the time of the museum's 50th anniversary in 2018, that year will mark the start of construction instead. Currently the museum has raised 70 percent of its $175 million capital campaign goal for construction, operation, and to build endowment. The existing museum will close on 7 January 2018, though no opening date has been set for the new building.