NEW YORK—If you’re wondering whether the New Museum’s monumental new home lives up to the hype, we’ll let the building answer for itself. As Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone’s rainbow-colored installation on the façade of the towering silver structure puts it, “Hell, Yes!”

From the street, the blocky, 60,000-square-feet, seven-story building, designed by Tokyo-based architects Sejima + Nishizawa/SANAA, looks like a disaster waiting to happen. Each floor is stacked on the one below in what appears to be a haphazard manner, and the seemingly unstable structure soars perilously high above the Bowery. But what ARTINFO found at today’s press preview was a friendly structure with a clean, modern interior and manageably sized galleries on its first four floors. Varying ceiling heights, strategically placed skylights, and a splash of neon green in the elevator add flavor, but not distractions, to the otherwise minimalist, almost all-white spaces.

A new education center on the fifth floor, packed with Macintosh computers, is the home of the promising new Museum as Hub initiative, which is billed as a “cultural laboratory” partnership with four international art organizations—Insa Art Space (Seoul), Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art (Cairo), Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, The Netherlands), Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo (Mexico City)—that will collaborate to develop programming for the center. New Museum director Lisa Phillips called the initiative “an educational/cultural hybrid that will be a platform for global dialogue.”

On the seventh floor, the Sky Room offers a dizzying, breathtaking, panoramic view of downtown. And down on the subterranean lower level, there’s a theater with high-tech amenities that seats 182 and an installation dedicated to the donors who made the new building possible.

Finally, sprawling throughout the galleries on the second through fourth floors is the museum’s inaugural exhibition, “Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century,” which features a range of recent work by such artists as John Bock, Urs Fischer, Rachel Harrison, and many others. Touted as an exploration of “crumbling symbols” and “broken icons," the show is a striking contrast to the space in which it is presented, given that the New Museum seems destined to become an icon itself.

The new New Museum opens to the public December 1. In the meantime, get a sneak peak by clicking on ARTINFO’s photo gallery to the left.