By Anne Levin

On a snowy evening last week, the auditorium at Princeton University’s Friend Center was packed with a standing-room-only crowd for a talk about the new building of the Princeton University Art Museum. James Steward, the museum’s director, and Chris Newth, its senior associate director for collections and exhibitions, revealed some of the challenges and surprises — happy and otherwise — that have come up during the project.

“We are finally at a point where we can say we are opening this year,” said Steward at the beginning of the event titled “Conversation: Hidden Stories: Preparing a New Museum.” But he wasn’t ready to set a specific date.

The January 16 event was part of the museum’s “Late Thursdays” programming. The focus was, largely, on the materials and design of the building’s interior. The museum’s three floors are to have a total square footage of 144,000 square feet, almost double the size of its former building.

Steward divided his presentation into what he called “vignettes,” with titles including “History,” “Design,” “Emptying Out,” “Demolition,” and “Construction.” Thinking about space, volume, and color for the new space, staff and the design team looked at museum expansions elsewhere in the world including the Louvre, the Museum of Modern Art, and museums in Hong Kong and on Long Island.

“We learned from things we love and things we don’t love in museums, like visible storage,” said Steward, showing images of glass cases that they found unappealing.

The original plan for the new museum, which was designed by Adjaye Associates, was to close the old one in the spring of 2021. But the COVID-19 pandemic forced the closure in spring of 2020.

“It actually gave us a chance to start earlier, without much visibility,” said Steward. “Many objects were conserved during COVID. We were able to evacuate everything in the old building — 56,000 objects — which is only half of what we have, without damage.”

Demolition was a long process “because of Princeton University’s commitment to sustainability and the re-use of nearly everything” in other projects, said Steward. Construction signified the first application 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. “I still maintain that the result will have outweighed the pain,” said Steward.

Newth noted that the museum is currently in the process of moving in some 25,000 objects. “It takes a long time,” he said. “It’s over 80,000 square feet of galleries.”

The project provides an opportunity to design and build new display cases, some of which are embedded into the building; most of which are constructed externally. “It’s very complicated,” said Newth. “Some of the cases are actually in the floor.”

The team of designers, engineers, and other professionals involved in the project come from as far as Scotland and Italy, and as near as Mt. Laurel. Images of the interiors-in-progress showed three wood-clad viewing rooms, one of which will have art on the ceiling.

Art is also on view in the third-floor restaurant, where there is a collections-inspired mosaic element in the design. “No one will be able to pop in for a quick latte without encountering art,” said Steward.