New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (photo courtesy of Hugo Schneider)
After nearly a decade of planning, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has finally unveiled designs for its new modern and contemporary art wing.
The museum has hired Mexican architect Frida Escobedo, known for her work on Mexico City’s Museo Experimental El Eco and London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, to design the 126,000-square-foot wing, which is now set to open in 2030. When completed, the new addition will be called the Tang Wing, named after Oscar L. Tang & H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang, who have collectively donated around $125 million to the museum. The Tang Wing will become the new home for the museum’s twentieth- and twenty-first-century art collections, allowing for 50% more wall space for such artworks than is currently available. Escobedo plans on using Mexican limestone for the project and has designed galleries with a celosía, a lattice often used in Spanish and Latin American architecture. It will allow visitors to look out into Central Park from inside the wing. The galleries will also be more spacious, with some ceilings as high as twenty-two feet, allowing for large installations and other projects. Escobedo’s designs include a new space for the museum’s sculpture garden. The Met has emphasized that the new wing will represent the museum’s commitment to accessibility, sustainability, and diversity. The project will work closely with neighborhood organizations, the Central Park Conservancy, and New York City’s Parks Department to ensure the addition will be integrated into the preexisting structure and the surrounding area. It also aims to earn a LEED Gold certification from the US Green Building Council. The construction will create around 4,000 union jobs.
The Met first announced its plans to create a new modern and contemporary wing in 2014. Since then, the project has raised about $550 million. Met director Max Hollein referred to the new designs as “extraordinarily inspired, deeply thoughtful and dynamic design”. He further commented that the designs also reinforce the museum’s responsibility “to present the art of our time in exceptionally compelling, scholarly, and innovative displays that illuminate the rich — and at times surprising — connections that can be drawn across our collection of 5,000 years of art history.” The Tang Wing will sit next to the Rockefeller Wing, the section dedicated to ancient American, African, and Pacific Art currently receiving its own refurbishment.