As the Studio Museum in Harlem approaches its 50th anniversary, it has announced plans to construct a new building, designed by the London-based architect David Adjaye, on its current West 125th Street site and an adjoining lot owned by the City of New York. The community-driven museum, founded in 1968 to support work by artists of African descent, has occupied the site since 1982 in a renovated 1914 bank building, which will be razed to make room for the new purpose-built structure.
David Adjaye’s 71,000-square-foot, five-storey design, to be submitted to the Public Design Commission of the City of New York on 14 July, will increase the museum’s public interior space by nearly 60%. It also exemplifies the museum’s neighbourhood roots, both in its formal inspiration from Harlem’s architecture—such as the four-storey central hall recalling church sanctuaries—and features that link the museum to the world outside, like a terrace along the front façade and an invitingly transparent ground floor. Adjaye designed the Sugar Hill housing complex, which includes a community gallery, also in Harlem and is working on the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History, Washington, DC.
Work on the new space is due to begin in 2017, with an estimated price tag of $122m to be picked up by private and public spending. The City of New York has so far pledged $35.3m to the project, with $11.4m from the budget for the 2016 fiscal year. The architecture and urban design firm Cooper Robertson, who also worked on the new Whitney Museum with Renzo Piano Building Workshops, will serve as the executive architect and project planning consultants. A spokeswoman says that it plans off-site programming during construction, details of which will be announced at a later date.
