Landmarks approves Frida Escobedo’s new Met Museum wing
Exterior rendering of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Tang Wing (view from the northwest corner). Visualization by © Filippo Bolognese Images, courtesy of Frida Escobedo Studio
The Landmarks Preservation Commission on Tuesday voted to approve architect Frida Escobedo’s design for a new wing at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The $550 million Tang Wing will replace the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing at the museum’s southwest corner and house its collection of 20th- and 21st-century art. The commission also approved landscape changes to Central Park next to the museum, which will include more trees and plantings.
The design and engineering team includes lead architect Frida Escobedo Studio, executive architect Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners, Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects, and engineering firms Kohler Ronan and Thornton Tomasetti.
The project demolishes and replaces the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing, which the museum says was not designed to properly display modern and contemporary art. The existing wing has low ceilings, inadequate square footage to house the collection, and no visual connection to Central Park.
The Tang Wing will be built within the existing building’s footprint and includes a three-story base, a recessed fourth floor, and a setback fifth floor, inspired by Roche Dinkeloo’s 1971 master plan.
Escobedo and her team embedded themselves in the museum to study its 21 individual buildings and learn about the program needs for each department. The Tang Wing, they discovered, is located at a key intersection of several major collections, providing an opportunity to better connect various periods and geographic regions.
The new wing will feature a “celosías” facade, inspired by a screen found in Mexican architecture and influenced by Arabic and North African traditions. The latticed limestone will be able to respond to sunlight throughout the day, while allowing views of Central Park without overexposing the galleries.
According to the architect, 80 percent of the exterior facade is solid, 10 percent is clear glass, and 10 percent is a celosia-style stone screen with glass behind it.
“These porous elements diffuse views into the park and help regulate the interior light,” Escobedo said during the LPC meeting on Tuesday. “The resulting opaque and porous surface will mediate the building’s facade layer history, signaling that the museum embraces a multiplicity of architectural expressions that echo the broader constellation of human culture.”
The gallery spaces will flow into one another and feature ceiling heights ranging from 11 to 22 feet to accommodate large-scale installations. The design includes a variety of galleries, from typical white box galleries protected from natural light to rooms with a view that face the park.
The project includes 18,500 square feet of outdoor space with stunning Central Park and skyline views across the fourth- and fifth-floor terraces. The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden will move to the fourth-floor terrace and increase in size from 7,500 to 10,000 square feet. There will also be a new cafe on the fifth floor.
“These views opening to the skyline of Manhattan will be accessible to the public year-round, extending the experience currently offered only seasonally from the Cantor rooftop,” Escobedo said.
“In a city where such vistas are typically reserved for private residences, this gesture reclaims the panorama as a shared public experience, one made visible and available to all.”
The project largely received praise from the public and the commissioners during Tuesday’s meeting. There was some concern about the new wing moving away from the museum’s 1971 master plan by Roche Dinkeloo focused on symmetry. But as several commissioners pointed out, the master plan can be appreciated only from a bird’s-eye view, and the western facade cannot be viewed in its entirety, unlike its famous Fifth Avenue facade.
Plus, Escobedo’s design continues several concepts of the master plan, including better circulation, more daylight as a wayfinding tool, and an improved connection with Central Park.
During Tuesday’s meeting, LPC Commissioner Jeanne Lutfy said, “master plans are not meant to be rigid.”
“There’s always an underlying, important foundation that remains, but these are like living, breathing, kind of organisms that have to be changed and modified as things change in the natural landscape and in the world,” Lutfy said.
“I think while it’s nice to wish that everything stays constant, it’s not necessarily the best way moving forward.”
Following an international competition, the museum chose the Mexico City-based architect over four other firms, including Ensamble Studio, Lacaton & Vassal, SO-IL, and David Chipperfield, according to the New York Times.
The Met unveiled Escobedo’s design last December, and public review for the project began this year. Construction is expected to begin on the addition in 2026, followed by the landscape the next year; completion is scheduled for 2030.
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