A striking cluster of serrated concrete bunkers has emerged at the heart of Princeton University's leafy New Jersey campus, sending shockwaves through the traditionally gothic landscape of turrets and ornate spires. The new Princeton University Art Museum's brutalist, blank facade reveals little from the outside, wrapped in rows of vertical gray ribs that contrast sharply with the arched windows of surrounding stone halls, resembling a high-security storage facility with a single, cyclopean window keeping watch.
This vault-like appearance proves fitting for the building's purpose as a repository for the university's remarkable collection of 117,000 art objects and antiquities. The collection spans millennia, from Etruscan urns and medieval staircases to expressionist paintings and contemporary sculptures. Previously scattered across a hodgepodge of extensions and additions accumulated over decades, the collection now has its own purpose-built home where it can truly shine.
However, the museum's opening carries significant controversy. The building represents the first major project by Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye to open since 2023, when three women accused him of sexual assault and harassment. While Adjaye has denied all allegations and no criminal charges were filed, the scandal caused his meteoric career to take a dramatic downturn, with numerous projects worldwide being cancelled. Princeton, however, decided to continue with the project.
"We were about 60% complete, so we couldn't exactly tear the building down," explains museum director James Steward. The university distanced itself from Adjaye Associates and transferred day-to-day coordination to Cooper Robertson, museum specialist architects who had been involved since the project's inception. Adjaye has not been on site and was not invited to the opening, which will take place on Halloween in what some see as a ghoulish coincidence.
Despite the controversy, the allegations have overshadowed what stands as one of the finest art museums built anywhere in recent years. The absence of the celebrity architect has allowed attention to focus on those who led the project after Adjaye stepped back, including Marc McQuade, former associate principal at Adjaye Associates; Erin Flynn, partner at Cooper Robertson; and Ron McCoy, Princeton's in-house architect. Together, they have created a space of exceptional substance and craftsmanship that celebrates theatrical spatial effects and sensuous material details.
The complex, partially nestled in a natural hollow, features nine raised gallery pavilions whose blunt facades soften at ground level through terraces and ramps that welcome visitors from all four sides. The main entrance, situated beneath a low overhang, opens into a dramatic four-story space where a colossal mosaic figure by artist Nick Cave leans forward in a vibrant gesture of welcome. Visitors pass through this pharaonic canyon into a lower, darker entrance space before reaching a lofty welcome gallery flooded with daylight from upper windows, where a grand staircase beckons toward the galleries.
"We wanted it to feel like an open thoroughfare," says chief curator Juliana Ochs Dweck, standing at the intersection of two routes that slice through the building north-south and east-west, following existing campus pathways. "If students happen to see a couple of works on their way through and get interested in the arts, that's a bonus." Beneath her feet, protected by a glass floor, lies a third-century Roman mosaic pavement excavated from near Antioch in the 1930s by Princeton archaeologists, depicting a drinking contest that could easily represent modern student life.
The museum's grand hall serves as a spectacular triple-height space where massive concrete buttresses extend overhead, supporting six-foot-deep wooden glulam beams that frame skylights above. Corner glazing provides tantalizing views of the ceramics collection on upper floors, while sliding oak panels can close off windows for events as retractable seating and a stage cleverly emerge. The space evokes Louis Kahn's Yale Center for British Art but with considerably more muscle, featuring sandblasted concrete that provides a rugged, geological quality enhanced by the sheer size of structural components.
Upstairs, the sequence of 32 galleries demonstrates brilliant planning, varying in size, height, and color to combat museum fatigue and eliminate the dreaded experience of trudging through endless white rooms. "This is not a museum that has embraced a white cube display approach since at least the 1980s," notes Steward, who has served as director since 2009 and co-curated around 150 exhibitions. "We used color as a way to address the design flaws of our previous building."
Each gallery features a different hue, ranging from pale greens to deep blues, with some walls upholstered in richly patterned fabrics that echo the stately drawing rooms where certain works once hung. Immaculate display cases designed by Milan's Goppion allow dense groupings of objects to shine, from netsuke sculptures to snuff bottles. Behind the scenes, mechanical systems are cleverly concealed within V-shaped wooden ceiling beams that carry air-handling and lighting tracks, while daylight enters through reflective solar tubes that spread even illumination across the rooms.
Three chapel-like spaces tucked into the building's corners offer visitors more contemplative encounters with specific works. Entirely lined in timber with built-in furniture and picture windows framing campus views, these secluded rooms provide welcome respite between the nine themed gallery zones. "It's nice to have a sit-down on your travels between Africa, Asia, and the ancient Mediterranean via the Americas," Steward observes.
Unlike the previous museum's unfortunate upstairs-downstairs separation that left many visitors never reaching the African and Asian galleries below, the new building places everything on one level while roughly doubling the display area. With no clear order or hierarchy, the design encourages wandering at will. "We want people to get productively lost," Steward explains. "The hope is that visitors will have accidental encounters on their way from point A to point B. We put our temporary exhibition space and the restaurant as far from the front door as possible to force people to encounter different things along the way."
Additional impressive details include an auditorium with walls of pink felt-covered ribs and chainmail curtains that secure galleries after hours, while public areas remain open until 10:45 PM nightly. The building features numerous study rooms and seating nooks built into interior and exterior walls, plus terracing that extends into the landscape for outdoor events during warmer months. The exceptional construction quality, particularly unusual in the United States, results from extensive prototyping and material testing, reflecting the client's exacting standards and contractor LF Driscoll's precision.
The success of Princeton's museum stands in stark contrast to other large-scale institutional work by Adjaye, which has often proven disappointing. His Idea Stores in London represent flimsy attempts at modernizing public libraries that now show their age, while his National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC features a dazzling exterior skin but remains clumsy and underwhelming inside. His Sugar Hill housing project in Harlem similarly prioritizes eye-catching wrapper over interior functionality, with many of his larger projects giving the impression of someone working in haste.
Whatever combination of factors elevated the Princeton museum far above these previous efforts – whether experienced lead architects, collaborative contractors, or an exceptional client – its success clearly stems from much more than one individual, whose name still hangs above the office door but whose contribution represents just one element of a remarkable collaborative achievement.
