On Wednesday, May 19, from noon to 6 p.m., the New Museum will offer free general admission and tours in honor of Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of the Tokyo-based firm SANAA, architects of the New Museum on the Bowery and the 2010 Laureates of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. Sejima is the second woman to receive this honor and Nishizawa, at forty-three years old, is the youngest winner in Pritzker history.

Several tours focusing on the New Museum’s building will be scheduled and hosted by architecture experts, many of whom were on the building’s original core architecture team, including Jonas Elding, Florian Idenburg, Toshihiro Oki, and Brett Schneider, among others. The Museum will also open the seventh-floor Sky Room (usually open on Saturday and Sundays only) to allow visitors the opportunity to experience the whole building and panoramic views of the Bowery. SANAA will be awarded the Pritzker Prize in a ceremony on Ellis Island on May 17.

The purpose of the Pritzker Architecture Prize is to annually honor a living architect whose built work demonstrates a combination of those qualities of talent, vision, and commitment, which has produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture.

Tour Schedule

12:30 PM: Jonas Elding, Project Architect at SANAA for the New Museum and co-founder of the architecture firm Elding Oscarson.

1:30 PM: Brett Schneider, Project Engineer at Guy Nordenson and Associates, Structural Engineer for both SANAA’s Toledo Museum of Art and the New Museum.

2:30 PM: Toshihiro Oki, Project Architect at SANAA for both the New Museum and the Derek Lam flagship store.

3:30 PM: Maddy Burke-Vigeland, Principal at Gensler, Executive Architect for the New Museum.

4:30 PM: Justin Davidson, architecture and classical music critic of New York magazine and winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in criticism for his work as the classical music and architecture critic at Newsday.

5:30 PM: Florian Idenburg, Chief Project Architect at SANAA for the New Museum; co-founder of SO – IL; and winner of the 2010 MoMA Young Architect Program.