The first floor is the entrance, classrooms and the Grand Hall for presentations and performances. The third floor houses offices and a full-service restaurant, Mosaic.

In between is the second floor with exhibition spaces that vary in size, shape, height and daylight, all oriented around the central shaft of the Grand Hall to help orient visitors.

“Daylight has a wonderful advantage in helping fight the problem of museum fatigue,” Steward said. “People are worn down by a sequence of similarly scaled gallery spaces where the light never changes. You can almost feel that you’re divorced from time and place.”

For the museum’s reopening, curators assembled “Princeton Collects,” a temporary exhibition of objects acquired during construction. While the museum was down, it launched a campaign to drive donations of artwork, resulting in about 2,000 new works coming from more than 200 museum supporters, including major pieces by Ai Weiwei, Joan Mitchell, Philadelphia artist Becky Suss and a monumental work by Irish artist Sean Scully so large that curators were unsure it would fit into the building.

“Real masterpieces — a problematic word — but by artists like Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler and later Gerhard Richter,” Steward said. “Artists that we could never have brought into the collection through purchase because their market values would have been beyond our means.”