With museums, galleries, and music halls seemingly around every corner in New York City, the venue itself becomes a critical component of the exhibition. CANYON, designed by New Affiliates, is a new cultural space that looks to draw crowds by innovating the audience experience by producing a hybrid mix of immersive programming via performance, sound, and moving images. The venue will occupy 40,000 square feet of a vacant commercial space in Essex Crossing.
Right off the Williamsburg Bridge in Manhattan, Essex Crossing is a mixed-use, nine-building project of roughly 2 million square feet. The megaproject was masterplanned by SHoP Architects and developed by a joint partnership between L&M Development Partners, BFC Partners, Taconic Investment Partners, and Goldman Sachs. While current developments at Essex Crossing are predominantly mixed-use towers with housing and retail space, CANYON joins the International Center of Photography as a cultural destination situated within the neighborhood.
“Revitalizing Manhattan’s commercial vacancies is both an urgent and stimulating prospect,” shared Ivi Diamantopoulou and Jaffer Kolb, cofounders of New Affiliates, in a press release. “We’re working in an unexpected environment full of possibility—the light-filled, soaring central atrium prompts us to imagine how the space could respond to this new evolving program. We’re excited to explore new ways of engaging contemporary art in our largest project to date.”
Alongside 18,000 square feet of gallery space, the venue will include a 60-foot-tall piazza, centralized to encourage social gathering whether visitors want to grab a cocktail with friends, sip on an afternoon coffee, or sit for dinner at the full-service restaurant inside. The flow of the piazza emphasizes a leisurely experience, encouraging gallery-goers to spend more time in the space beyond appreciating the art.
In a world where immediate gratification is often encouraged through anything and everything from short form content to overnight shipping, CANYON stands for a slower method of consumption by highlighting art experiences that take time to fully encounter. According to its website, CANYON is conceived as a “hybrid between museum, performing arts venue, and the downtown social scene.”
Early renderings reveal a brick facade with extensive glazing. They also show, a view from the street in which large projections inside are made visible through the window. Inside, seating and a bar embrace the curvilinear forms of the walls and passageways. The venue will also include a performance hall that can accommodate up to 260 for events such as podcast tapings, concerts, and screenings.
Arriving in 2026, CANYON will have evening focused hours, and present three annual exhibition cycles in the spring, summer, and fall. Launched earlier this month, the project was founded by philanthropist and art collector Robert Rosenkranz, and is helmed by Joe Thompson, founding director of MASS MoCA. Several shows are currently in development.
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