The Met breaks ground on Frida Escobedo’s new wing for modern and contemporary art
Photo credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The biggest project in a $1.5 billion transformation of the country’s most visited museum officially kicked off this week. The Metropolitan Museum of Art on Tuesday celebrated the groundbreaking of a new five-story wing dedicated to contemporary and modern art, designed by Mexico City-based architect Frida Escobedo. As one piece of an ongoing revamp of the Upper East Side museum, the Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Wing will increase gallery space by 50 percent, add new outdoor space with views of Central Park, and create better connections to the rest of the museum.
The new wing will remain within the footprint of the existing building on the southwest corner of the museum, replacing the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing. There’s a three-story base, a recessed fourth floor, and a setback fifth floor, inspired by Roche Dinkeloo’s 1971 master plan.
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.
As 6sqft previously reported, Escobedo and her team studied the museum’s nearly two dozen individual buildings and learned about the program needs for each department. They discovered that the Tang Wing 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, providing Central Park views without overexposing the galleries. Most of the exterior facade is solid, 10 percent is clear glass, and 10 percent is a celosia-style stone screen with glass behind it.
The project also includes 18,500 square feet of outdoor space across terraces on the fourth and fifth floors. 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; a new cafe will be located on the fifth floor. The views of Central Park and the Manhattan skyline will be accessible to the public all year, instead of just seasonally, as from the former Cantor rooftop.
During Tuesday’s groundbreaking ceremony, Escobedo, who is the first woman to design a wing at the museum in its 156-year history, said a groundbreaking in Spanish is called la primera piedra, which means the first stone. The architect said that architecture, as well as institutions, is “never entirely finished” and keeps evolving. As her team spent years imagining and developing the project, she said that “la primera piedra” marks “not a beginning, but a transformation.”
Expected to open in 2030, the new wing is the highlight of the museum’s larger effort to revamp its galleries and public spaces.
New spaces include a renovated Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, which includes 40,000 square feet of sub-Saharan Africa, the ancient Americas, and Oceania artworks and opened in 2025, and a new exhibition gallery for The Costume Institute off of the Great Hall that opened this year. Galleries dedicated to the art of ancient West Asia and ancient Cyprus will open in 2027.
The Met has raised $670 million in private funds for the project, which covers the full cost of the construction and a portion of the new wing’s endowment.
“The Met’s new wing will transform how we present 20th- and 21st-century art, expanding our galleries and connecting our modern and contemporary art collection more closely to the thousands of years of art housed within the museum,” Max Hollein, the Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer, said in a statement.
“Importantly, the new wing will also serve as a welcoming new space for museum goers and for all of New York City.”
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