The new Princeton University Art Museum designed by Adjaye Associates has opened to the public, marking one of the most striking museum buildings to emerge in decades. However, the opening comes amid ongoing controversy surrounding lead architect David Adjaye, who faces allegations of sexual misconduct that surfaced in July 2023. The museum was already 50 percent complete when the allegations became public, leading Princeton and other institutions to distance themselves from the acclaimed Ghanaian-British architect.
"It would be a fiction to pretend that someone else designed it—he was the lead architect," says James Steward, who has served as the museum's director since 2009. Despite this acknowledgment, Princeton has officially distanced itself from Adjaye, who will not attend the building's opening ceremony. The situation reflects a broader challenge facing the art world, as the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Museum of West African Art in Benin City, Nigeria, are also preparing to open buildings designed by Adjaye before the allegations emerged.
Steward addresses this dilemma directly, standing in the museum's newly installed European Art gallery. "We have to find ways to separate the work from the maker," he explains. "How many of these artists would we be able to exhibit if we couldn't do that?" This philosophical approach acknowledges that Adjaye is hardly the first person in history to have both a controversial personal life and artistic output worthy of serious study.
The new Princeton University Art Museum replaces what had been a confusing arrangement since 1989, where the museum, fine arts library, and department of arts and archaeology were crammed into five different buildings spanning a century of architectural styles. When Adjaye Associates and Cooper Robertson won the design competition in 2018, beating out renowned firms including Michael Maltzan Architecture, Johnston Marklee, and Snøhetta, they faced a clear mandate: modernize the facility, increase display space for art, and solve what Steward calls the "upstairs/downstairs problem"—the perceived hierarchy of artworks based on their physical placement within a museum.
The solution required doubling the building's size to 146,000 square feet, creating a significant challenge in a historic campus area filled with charming Collegiate Gothic buildings. Adjaye's innovative response was to break up the massive structure required by the program into nine separate pavilions, each sized to echo the scale of neighboring buildings. These pavilions are then stitched together and connected, with seven serving as galleries, one housing conservation studios, and the ninth—a partially reused and re-clad 1960s structure—functioning as the fine arts library.
This pavilion strategy offers multiple benefits beyond scale compatibility. Some pavilions rest firmly on the ground while others daringly cantilever into space, creating visual interest and functional variety. As Erin Flynn, partner in charge at Cooper Robertson, points out, "The strategy also gave each department its own front door," providing independence and identity for different museum functions.
The building's most striking feature is its serrated facade of precast concrete that unifies all the constituent pavilions. This robust, muscular gesture has clear neo-Brutalist influences and builds on Adjaye's extensive experience with precast concrete, evident in projects like the pitted charcoal-colored surface of 130 William Street in Lower Manhattan and the patterned panels of his Sugar Hill Housing in Harlem. Each concrete module at the Princeton museum measures 8 feet by 32 feet and includes two serrations that project beyond the slab cap beneath them.
The facade's most remarkable feature lies in its polished tips, which are filled with large aggregate that has been ground and polished to expose a field of white and cream-colored calcite. These polished sections create radiant vertical stripes that provide high-contrast complement to the shadows cast by the jagged facade. "We tried different aggregate mixes—a white version, a black version, and an in-between one," explains Ron McCoy, Princeton's university architect. "When we viewed the mock-ups next to the neighboring classical buildings," he adds, gesturing toward Clio and Whig halls, "we knew which direction to go."
The precast concrete elements rest atop a base of darker, heavily sandblasted concrete and are accented by battens of extruded aluminum with an anodized bronze finish. These aluminum elements appear in small sections, on canopies, and at the recessed parapet, always arranged to reinforce a strong vertical rhythm. The overall effect brings to mind the painstakingly hammered corduroy concrete of Paul Rudolph's Art & Architecture Building at Yale and the obsessive attention to detail of Italian architect Carlo Scarpa, who masterfully wove together tapestries of texture and often trimmed his raw concrete with bronze accents.
While the museum can be accessed from all sides—a significant departure from its predecessor—most public visitors will arrive from McCosh Walk to the north, where admission remains free of charge. From this main approach, visitors descend a staircase and pass beneath one of the floating pavilions before emerging in an open-air, triple-height entry court. This dramatic space is capped by skylights and features a matrix of mass-timber trusses, offering the first hint of a material that will feature more prominently throughout the interior.
The entry court showcases a monumental installation by artist Nick Cave, rendered in mosaic tile, metal, and wood sourced from trees felled on-site during construction. The figured sculpture bends down in what Cave describes as a "prodigious gesture of welcome," immediately establishing the museum's commitment to both historical and contemporary art. This entrance lies along a north-south axis that begins with a gate on Nassau Street—the university's historic boundary between town and campus—and continues directly through the museum building.
This axial arrangement helps fulfill a vision that dates back more than a century. McCoy's predecessor, Ralph Adams Cram, once envisioned a series of courtyards for this same site, as illustrated in a 1910 issue of Architectural Record as part of Montgomery Schuyler's American campus series. The new museum structure finally helps manifest this long-dormant idea, creating the kind of ordered, ceremonial sequence that Cram originally imagined.
Inside the building, the almost dauntingly long main corridor has been carefully punctuated with special moments to break up the journey and provide visual interest. Museum visitors and students pass by a major stair hall that leads to most galleries and the third-floor restaurant, plus a gift shop, architecturally embedded display cases built into walls and floors, carefully framed views out to the campus, and the remarkable Grand Hall that serves as the building's ceremonial heart.
The Grand Hall represents both an architectural and technological tour de force. This multipurpose room functions as lecture hall, special event venue, and informal lounge, packing considerable punch in its rectangular plan. The space is lined with heavily sandblasted concrete, and one story up, solid corners have been replaced by glass display cases with dense arrangements of vessels and pottery. Four prominent fins—which Steward likens to flying buttresses—project outward from the center of each wall, drawing the eye upward to a deep cruciform truss nearly 30 feet overhead.
This Grand Hall seems to be a spiritual sibling to the vestibule at Louis Kahn's Yale Center for British Art, but where Kahn used smooth concrete, pewter-colored stainless steel, and oak paneling, Adjaye has chosen a more textural palette. His material selection includes roughened concrete, both oak and black spruce wood, bronze accents, and terrazzo flooring, creating a warmer and more tactile environment than Kahn's cooler, more austere approach.
Beyond its architectural impact, the Grand Hall showcases impressive technological capabilities. Retractable auditorium-style seating can accommodate up to 236 people for lectures and special events. A mechanized stage, normally flush with the floor, can rise as high as 36 inches for performances and presentations. Sliding panels can enclose the display cases when needed, and integrated window shades can completely darken the room for audiovisual presentations.
Adjacent to the Grand Hall lies the 12,000-square-foot education center, which represents the heart of the institution's pedagogical mission. This area includes five specialized classrooms dedicated to object study, where students and faculty can closely examine and discuss individual pieces from the collection. Additional facilities include a 70-seat auditorium, several seminar rooms, and two wet labs for hands-on conservation and research work.
"In the old building, we were handling about 10,000 objects per academic year," Steward explains. "We've done an analysis of the objects that are most frequently used in teaching, and those are now stored on-site." This strategic approach means that the most educationally valuable pieces are immediately accessible to faculty and students, dramatically improving the museum's effectiveness as a teaching tool.
Returning to the entry court area, visitors can leave the main north-south axis and enter a double-height stair hall that leads to the second floor gallery spaces. Here, the use of mass timber as the museum's load-bearing ceiling structure comes into full view, and the volumetric complexity of the pavilioned design scheme becomes much clearer. The interplay between the individual pavilions creates a varied and dynamic spatial experience as visitors move through the building.
Visitors enter each of the expansive galleries through portals framed in misty granite, then move from one space to another through smaller, more intimate curated areas. "I never fantasized that we could get a floor plate large enough to fit 95 percent of the galleries, but miraculously we did," says Steward with evident satisfaction. In total, the second floor includes 32 distinct display areas, with the smallest measuring 144 square feet and the largest pavilion galleries reaching approximately 4,000 square feet.
One of the most refreshing aspects of the new museum is its rejection of the bland white walls that dominate so much contemporary museum architecture. Even the space dedicated to modern and contemporary art features a rich, full-bodied ivory tone reminiscent of traditional plasterwork. Wendy Evans Joseph, who worked on the exhibition design, collaborated closely with curators to develop distinct color families and select fabric backdrops for different galleries. The result includes deep blues and blue-greens for European Art, lighter and jewel tones for American Art, and other carefully coordinated palettes throughout the building.
A perennial challenge in museum design involves balancing natural daylight with artificial lighting while protecting valuable artworks from damage. Five of the large galleries prominently feature V-shaped glue-laminated black spruce beams positioned 18 feet overhead and varying between 39 to 87 inches in depth. These beams conceal building systems while forming coffers that are spanned by light-diffusing scrims. Above this visible ceiling lies a hidden 7-foot-tall attic space, flooded with controllable daylight introduced through an array of adjustable solar tubes.
"Museum buildings, in many ways, are like laboratories—dense with mechanical, electrical, lighting, audiovisual, and security systems that could easily overwhelm a space," explains Marc McQuade, a former associate principal at Adjaye Associates who worked on the project from its inception. "At Princeton, we designed these systems to disappear into the architecture," ensuring that the sophisticated technical requirements never interfere with the visitor experience or the presentation of art.
The sprawling new structure allows the museum to display approximately 5 percent of its collection of 117,000 objects, representing a significant increase from the previous 2 percent. Steward takes considerable pride in this achievement, especially considering the doubled square footage of the building and the more than doubled number of works on display. With regular rotations of the collection, that figure could potentially reach 10 percent, giving the public unprecedented access to Princeton's remarkable artistic holdings.
Throughout the galleries, visitors will encounter carefully placed apertures that offer contextualizing views of the campus, where lighting constraints permit such openings. "One of my critiques of museum architecture is that it's so interchangeable—that a museum could equally be in Berlin or Beijing," Steward observes. The Princeton museum deliberately counters this tendency by maintaining visual connections to its specific place and context.
Especially observant visitors will discover three special "viewing rooms" tucked into corners of the museum, offering respite and unique perspectives. One such room surrounds visitors with faceted walls while windows allow them to peer both toward the campus and back into the entry court. Another viewing room, surrounded by curved bentwood banquettes, features Jane Irish's depiction of the cosmos overhead like a ceiling fresco, creating an almost chapel-like atmosphere for quiet contemplation.
As Steward acknowledges the complexity of crediting such an ambitious project, the question of authorship remains complicated by recent events. "A building, especially one as large and complex as this one, is never about a single person, even if the vision seems singular," he reflects. Adjaye himself has previously stated that "Architecture should have more weight to it than just being a series of signatures that become recognizable," emphasizing the collaborative nature of significant architectural projects. Hundreds of people were ultimately responsible for the Princeton University Art Museum's realization, from the initial design team through construction crews and specialized craftspeople.
Yet it remains difficult to deny Adjaye's distinctive architectural hand or to challenge the idea that his practice has fundamentally recharted the course of contemporary museum design over the past two decades. His approach to materiality, spatial sequence, and the integration of art and architecture has influenced countless other projects and architects. The Princeton museum in particular refuses to take the passive approach of simply letting the art speak for itself—instead, the architecture rises to meet the collection as an equal partner in creating meaningful cultural experiences.
The Princeton University Art Museum stands as an exceptional work of architecture and a worthy addition to the pantheon of great American museums. It demonstrates sophisticated problem-solving in addressing the practical challenges of museum operations while creating spaces that genuinely enhance the experience of encountering art. The building succeeds in bridging the gap between Princeton's historic campus character and the needs of a modern, world-class cultural institution.
Ultimately, the question of who deserves credit for this remarkable achievement remains complex and unresolved. While the personal controversies surrounding David Adjaye cannot be ignored, the building itself represents the collaborative efforts of hundreds of talented individuals working toward a common goal. The Princeton University Art Museum opened to the public on October 31, 2024, ready to serve students, scholars, and the broader community for generations to come.
