The architect Frida Escobedo has drawn on her Mexican heritage in reimagining the galleries for Modern and contemporary art.
By Robin Pogrebin
The metaphor of weaving has informed Frida Escobedo’s design for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s long-awaited new wing for Modern and contemporary art, which was unveiled on Tuesday.
It is present in the architectural screen of limestone lattice that wraps the new wing’s exterior on the museum’s southwest corner, creating a diaphanous surface that will change as the sun moves through it during the day. It is present in the placement of windows, offering glimpses of the city and the park. And it is present in the way that the new wing will connect to the adjacent galleries, emphasizing the connectivity between different regions, disciplines and civilizations.
“How can we start understanding the rhythm and the cadence that the museum has?” Escobedo said in a recent joint interview with Max Hollein, the museum’s director, in his Met office.
“The challenge was to weave these connections with the existing museum and adjacent wings and also to make connections with the park in a very subtle way,” she continued. The current campus “is very complex — it looks like a medieval town with plazas and towns and squares and little alleys, where you can get lost, which could be fascinating, but also very disorienting.”
The architect Frida Escobedo and Max Hollein, director of the Met, looking over a model of the new Tang Wing for Modern and contemporary art that Escobedo is designing. Credit…Vincent Tullo for The New York Times
At a time when museums all over the world are rethinking how they present art for a modern audience, Escobedo’s design marks a significant step forward for the long-delayed Met project. It also represents a do-over; a previous design by the architect David Chipperfield, who was selected for the job in 2015, was jettisoned after ballooning in cost to as much as $800 million.
Personally, the project catapults the career of Escobedo, a 45-year-old architect from Mexico City who is the first woman to design a wing in the museum’s 154-year history.
And the design significantly advances the Met’s goal to set right its presentation of Modern and contemporary art, which has long seemed like an afterthought in a corner of the museum — isolated and cut off from the rest of the Fifth Avenue building — and has failed to effectively showcase the museum’s holdings.
“This has been a priority for the museum for quite some time — to really have proper galleries for the Met’s collection of modern and contemporary art,” Hollein said. “The Met has had a commitment toward the art of its time from the very beginning of its history. That’s differentiated us from the Louvre, from the British Museum, the Prado and all these other places. They don’t have their collections going up to this current moment.”
Rendering shows the Tang Wing wrapped in a stone lattice exterior. A fourth-floor terrace replaces and expands the current Cantor Roof Garden. A new fifth-floor terrace includes galleries and a cafe. Windows punctuate the facade. At far left, the glass-enclosed Petrie European Sculpture Court will remain; at right is the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing for African, Ancient American and Oceanic Art. Credit…Filippo Bolognese Images; via Frida Escobedo Studio
A gallery on the fifth floor has a south-facing window looking across a terrace to Central Park and the city skyline. “It’s more approachable,” Escobedo said. “That was part of the intention — to make people feel invited.” Credit…Filippo Bolognese Images; via Frida Escobedo Studio
The project, named the Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Wing after that couple’s lead donation of $125 million, will increase gallery space by nearly 50 percent, with more than 70,000 square feet; address accessibility, infrastructure and sustainability; and provide an architecturally distinctive home for the Met’s collection of 20th- and 21st-century art.
The new five-story wing will replace the existing Lila Acheson Wallace wing and remain within its footprint, which was achieved by removing back of house areas and moving offices, storage and art handling out of the wing. And it will sit lower than the Great Hall, the majestic 1902 main entry and the tallest point of the museum.
The project is expected to cost about $500 million and to open in 2030. In May 2024, the Museum announced it had reached its fund-raising milestone of $550 million in private donations for the wing (the Met is raising an additional $150 million for an endowment to support the addition’s operating costs).
To achieve a sense of weaving in the project, Escobedo said she drew on her birthplace, Mexico City, which she described as “a very, very layered city.”
“It comes from layering in terms of the materiality, cultural layering and also the idea of coexisting with a landscape and translating specific forms or shapes or typologies of architecture and making them our own,” she added. “And also the idea of a past that is living in the present, something that is constantly evolving and changing.”
David Breslin, the Met’s curator in charge of Modern and contemporary art, who has been working closely with Escobedo, in an interview called the weaving concept “beautiful.”
Above, rendering of the textured stone facade of the new Tang Wing, looking west. “The Met has had a commitment toward the art of its time from the very beginning of its history,” said Max Hollein, the museum’s director. Credit…Filippo Bolognese Images; via Frida Escobedo Studio
Just as museums like the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney have moved away from didactic storytelling with their new buildings — abandoning delineated discipline areas and bringing in more diverse voices — the Escobedo design encourages a sense of personal discovery. “Frida’s architecture frequently asks you to ask yourself where you are,” Breslin said. “You don’t feel like you’re being led, you’re invited to move forward or to change directions. There is a lot of freedom to the way she’s designed the wing.”
At the same time, the Met wanted the galleries to be defined, so Escobedo has varied their ceiling heights and dimensions, which Hollein said creates the “drama of space unfolding.”
Whereas the existing wing by Kevin Roche seems to turn its back to the park, the new design calls for the facade to have a greater porosity and, in some cases, transparency, with new windows or veiled openings with views to the park and new landscaping.
“It’s more approachable,” Escobedo said. “That was part of the intention — to make people feel invited.”
Because the Met sits on city land and its exterior has landmark designation, the new wing’s design will have to go through a public approval process. But the museum has already been paving the way with various stakeholders, some of whom have been wary about changes to the existing structure and how they might impact the surrounding park.
Frida Escobedo, the architect of the new Tang Wing, which will be completed in 2030. Credit…Vincent Tullo for The New York Times
“We have long supported the Met’s effort to upgrade the Modern and contemporary Art Wing,” said Betsy Smith, the president and chief executive of the Central Park Conservancy, in a statement to The Times. “The Met has been receptive to our concerns and we appreciate the changes they have made over the course of the design process for the new wing, including being attentive to its mass and its impact on the park, which have resulted in a better design.”
Nuha E. Ansari, the executive director of Friends of the Upper East Side Historic Districts, said the Met’s “arguments for why they need the new wing are quite compelling since it seems Roche’s Wallace Wing can’t be reworked to fit the museum’s current needs.” She added that Escobedo’s “ideas for improving circulation between the older wings and the new seem well conceived.”
Escobedo’s design, which connects to the Met’s adjacent galleries with eight entrances, draws on the museum’s architectural past. Featuring a three-story base with a recessed fourth floor and a further set back fifth floor, the scaled facade nods to the 1971 Roche Dinkeloo master plan, which is visible in the seven buildings designed by Roche. The design also integrates elements from the Beaux-Arts Fifth Avenue facade designed by Richard Morris Hunt and McKim, Mead and White.
Escobedo Studio, the lead design architect, is working in collaboration with Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners; Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects; and the engineering firms Kohler Ronan and Thornton Tomasetti.
The Tang Wing is adjacent to the newly renovated Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, which displays art from sub-Saharan Africa, the Ancient Americas and Oceania, and to the Petrie European Sculpture Court, which features monumental Italian and French sculptures.
At left, the Petrie European Sculpture Court will remain, but the blocky Lila Acheson Wallace Wing by Kevin Roche at right will be replaced by the Tang Wing. Credit…via Frida Escobedo Studio
The fifth floor will feature a 1,000-square-foot cafe and a landscaped outdoor area. The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden, currently located on the fifth floor, will move to the fourth-floor terrace, where it will expand from 7,500 square feet to nearly 10,000 square feet.
The new wing is expected to help the Met draw important gifts of contemporary and Modern art from collectors who may have hesitated to donate works to galleries widely considered inadequate.
It will finally give pride of place to the 2013 gift of 90 Cubist paintings, drawings and sculptures from the philanthropist and cosmetics tycoon Leonard A. Lauder. It will also provide an official debut to some of the 220 artworks by Philip Guston, one of America’s most influential postwar painters, that were donated to the Met in 2022 by his daughter, Musa Mayer.
But Hollein said acquisitions are not a significant rationale for the Met’s reimagining of its home for Modern and contemporary art. “The main purpose of this building is not to attract collections,” he said. The purpose is to “provide the proper environment to tell the stories and to display the collections that we already have, and to further expand on that.”
