NEW YORK.- The New Museum announced today that it will open an exhibition of work by the highly regarded firm Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA, designers of the institution's recently opened building on the Bowery. The exhibition will present commissions and projects spanning the last decade, a highly productive period when their projects like The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa; the Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art; and the new New Museum in New York won them considerable critical acclaim and public recognition. "SANAA: Works 1998-2008," a collaboration between the New Museum's Lisa Phillips, Toby Devan Lewis Director and Karen Wong, Director of External Affairs, and SANAA, will also provide an opportunity to understand the new New Museum in the context of the firm's other work and practice. The exhibition will take the form of an environment rather than a traditional exhibition, exploiting and further 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." The exhibition will be on view from March 28 through June 15, 2008.

With "SANAA: Works 1998-2008," Sejima and Nishizawa will 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 is luminous and deceptively simple in its aesthetics; sophisticated in its treatment of complex building detail and fluid, nonhierarchical space; and highly original in its use of exterior façades as permeable membranes that establish subtle but provocative 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.

Sejima studied architecture at the Japan Women's University before going to work for the celebrated architect Toyo Ito. She launched her own practice in 1987 and was named Young Architect of the Year in Japan in 1992. Nishizawa studied architecture at Yokohama National University and, in addition to his work with Sejima, has maintained an independent practice since 1997. The architects have worked collaboratively in the partnership of SANAA since 1995, and together draw upon their individual sensibilities to continuously test the possibilities of design.

On the occasion of "SANAA: Works 1998-2008," the Museum will release SHIFT: SANAA and the New Museum, a book about the making of the New Museum's building on the Bowery.

SHIFT: SANAA and the New Museum presents the design and making of the New Museum on the Bowery in New York through a series of interwoven stories, documents, and dialogues. The book includes photography by Dean Kaufman and essays by cultural theorist Sanford Kwinter and Lisa Phillips, Toby Devan Lewis Director of the New Museum, who describes the adventure of creating the building. This richly illustrated, 136-page book offers a close look at SANAA's design and process of building this New York City cultural landmark. The book is co-edited by Joseph Grima, former editor and adviser at Domus Magazine and current director of the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York, and Karen Wong, the Director of External Affairs at the New Museum, and is designed by Amsterdam-based studio Mevis & Van Deursen, and co-published by Lars Müller.

SHIFT SANAA and the New Museum has been made possible in part by Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown. Additional support has been provided by the J. McSweeney and G. Mills Publications Fund at the New Museum.