Southwest facade, Princeton University Art Museum, 2025. (Courtesy of the Princeton University Art Museum. Photo by Richard Barnes)

The Princeton University Art Museum’s New Building Takes the Institution To the Next Level

By Anne Levin

There are art museums, and there are university art museums.

The former tend to be the big players — located in major cities, with impressive, permanent collections and short-term, blockbuster exhibits that draw eager crowds.

The latter are smaller and easier to navigate. While they embrace a multitude of art forms and boast both permanent and visiting exhibits, their focus tends to be academic. Most are located on the outskirts of a campus rather than at its core.

Grand Hall, Princeton University Art Museum, 2025. (Courtesy of the Princeton University Art Museum. Photo by Richard Barnes)

The new building for the Princeton University Art Museum (PUAM), being readied for its grand opening on Halloween, straddles both categories. But with its 80,000 square feet of gallery space in a 146,000-square-foot building — double the size of its predecessor; its sleek interior designed by Adjaye Architects, with Cooper Robertson as the Architect of Record; and its Grand Hall for lectures, performances, and parties, it leans more toward the “big museum” category.

The new PUAM’s location at the heart of the campus, on the site of the 1966 building that preceded it, further distinguishes it from other university art museums. But rebuilding on that location wasn’t always the plan.

James Steward, Director of Princeton University Art Museum. (Photo by Jeffrey E. Tryon)

When James Steward was offered the job of museum director in 2008, ideas were already in place to create a satellite museum for contemporary art, near what is now the Lewis Center for the Arts and the Dinky train station, rather than enlarging the existing building. That gave him pause.

“My predecessor didn’t think it was possible to build a new museum at the same location,” says Steward. “But I thought moving it was a problematic idea. The risk was that it could have turned the old museum into a mausoleum.”

By the time Steward accepted the job a year later, the economic downturn had put the whole project on hold. It would be nearly another decade before plans were finalized.

“I was glad, actually,” says Steward. “In hindsight, it was a gift. We knew, going back 30 years, that it was necessary to have a bigger place. This allowed us to take our time. I showed them that there was philanthropic support. And there has been a continuity of leadership in the 16 years I have been here — only two presidents — that allowed us to develop those relationships.”

American Art Galleries, Princeton University Art Museum, 2025. (Courtesy of the Princeton University Art Museum. Photo by Richard Barnes)

Once the economy picked up, the plan was to close the old museum in the spring of 2021. Enter the COVID-19 pandemic, forcing the doors of the building to be shut a year earlier. This unexpected pause provided another silver-lining moment, allowing for the conservation of many objects, and the careful evacuation of the building without damage.

The demolition that followed was a long process because of the University’s commitment to sustainability and the reuse of materials in other projects, says Steward. In a talk this past January, he recalled that construction of the museum was among the first applications of heavy timber on the campus. Some of the pieces were so big that they couldn’t be gotten around the traffic circle on Faculty Road. That involved some reconstruction.

The new museum is three stories tall and made up of nine interlocking pavilions containing many of its new galleries. Two “artwalks” form the core circulation on the ground level.The floors are mostly a mix of terrazzo and hardwood.

The Entrance Hall and Grand Stair have terrazzo walls; the latter faces a medieval Spanish staircase. Visitors can walk over recessed ancient floor mosaics. In addition to the roomy galleries, there are more intimate gallery spaces known as “viewing rooms.” These areas offer a chance to rest and reflect, with windows that look out onto the rooftops of the historic campus.

Seating is generous throughout the building. A restaurant on the top floor, aptly titled Mosaic, has tables indoors and out. It is scheduled to be open for morning and afternoon café service, as well table service at lunchtime. Themed dinner events inspired by the PUAM’s collections are also planned.

West facade, Princeton University Art Museum, 2025. (Courtesy of the Princeton University Art Museum. Photo by Richard Barnes)

Adjaye’s design for the exterior is of alternating rough and polished stone panels. Once the building began to take shape, some unfavorable comments from alumni and the public began coming in. The terms “austere” and “industrial-looking” surfaced more than once.

Steward and Princeton University Architect Ron McCoy have fielded many of those comments. Both are confident that once the doors open, people will change their tunes — if they haven’t already.

“A lot of that angst has begun to go away,” says Steward. “The fences are coming down, and it’s beginning to kind of nestle into the landscape. The building was designed from the inside out. The exterior doesn’t foreshadow everything to be found within.”

“I have toured a small number of people through the building, primarily professional architects and journalists, including alums,” writes McCoy in an email. “I would have to say the reaction to those who have fully experienced the building is overwhelmingly positive. Visitors are stunned by the overall quality of the design.”

West facade detail, Princeton University Art Museum, 2025. (Courtesy of the Princeton University Art Museum. Photo by Richard Barnes

Once the building is open, McCoy hopes alumni and the public in general will “take some time to appreciate the design, to recognize the careful framing of historic campus landmarks and vistas, the precise scale and references to the adjacent classical pavilions of Whig and Clio [halls], the dramatic experience of both the mass and delicacy of the gallery pavilions, the rich textures of stone, concrete, wood, and terrazzo that invite the touch of the eye and the hand, the experience of the body moving through space and, of course, beautiful settings for learning and enjoyment of art.”

Four large-scale commissions by artists Nick Cave, Diana Al-Hadid, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, and Jane Irish, plus new acquisitions by ceramicist Jun Kaneko and sculptor Rose. B. Simpson are part of the building and its grounds.

“We build on a tradition of public art at Princeton extending to the 1960s with the commissioning of works by major modern artists of the time, including Henry Moore, Alexander Calder, and Louise Nevelson,” Steward is quoted on the university website. “These six commissions and site-specific acquisitions bring a vibrant new cohort of international voices to bear in that existing collection with works that will be beautiful and arresting.”

Art has been a player in Princeton University’s history since New Jersey Colonial Governor Jonathan Belcher presented a gift of “my own Picture at full length in a gilt Frame” to be hung in Nassau Hall. The new building marks the sixth generation of museums since the original structure in 1890.

Ancient Mediterranean Art Galleries, Princeton University Art Museum, 2025. (Courtesy of the Princeton University Art Museum. Photo by Richard Barnes)

The PUAM is essentially a teaching museum, housing more than 12,000 feet of education space — creativity labs, classrooms, an auditorium, and the Grand Hall. It is a new home to the Department of Art and Archaeology. But it is designed to be much more than that.

“Like universities themselves, university museums should be places of discovery,” says Steward. “The best become wider laboratories for everyone on campus, not just art historians. We are a small subset of university museums that are the only museums on their campuses. Relatively few have the capacity, both intellectually and financially, to attempt this kind of reach. We had that in the old museum, but no room to do it.”

Unlike its predecessor, the new building doesn’t create obstacles. “We had the ‘upstairs/downstairs’ problem in the old building,” says Steward. “There is something really special about the under-one-roof thing. The collections can talk across borders of intellectual boundaries. The past and present can have a dialogue. We deal with many of the world’s cultures, and that’s unusual.”

Steward acknowledges that those who appreciated the intimate scale of the old building might be wary of the larger, more complex space.

“To really do this museum will take a half day or more,” he says. “But it’s free. You can do it in bite-sized nuggets. And the architecture gives you permission to behave in a certain way, which I hope is a happy surprise for some.”

The goal is to make the PUAM equally appealing to academics and non-academics. “We want the galleries to be arresting and compelling to both,” Steward says. “We will have public programming that unites disparate audiences. It’s not an either/or choice. It’s all part of the university’s commitment to being of service. We want the whole of the collection to be intelligible to a novice museumgoer and an expert at the same time.”

Some 40 new security officers have been hired for the new building. “Maybe it’s too many. Maybe it’s not enough. We’ll see,” says Steward. “We can pivot. The important thing is that finally, we have a building that architecturally and materially honors the collections we have the honor of caring for. Because we didn’t in the past.”

Grand Hall, Princeton University Art Museum, 2025. (Courtesy of the Princeton University Art Museum. Photo by Richard Barnes)