Perhaps sensitive to the same kind of issues we raised in a previous post, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, on the Bowery in New York, has named its first show Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century. The building is the latest museum to be designed by SANAA, the architect team of Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa who didn’t get to design a new Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney in 1997. As architect and author Robert Bevan points out today in another article in the AFR Magazine, since the SANAA team missed out on the MCA, they’ve gone on to build museums in Toledo, Nagano and Valencia. Looks good… let’s see if the title of the first show belies the building’s impact on its neighbourhood – not that there’s much of heritage value on the lower East Side. We’ll keep our eyes open for reviews.