Metropolitan Museum Reveals Designs for Long-Awaited Modern and Contemporary Art Wing

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has finally revealed its designs for a five-story wing dedicated to modern and contemporary art, an addition that has been in the planning stages for about a decade.

That wing will span 126,000 square feet, and is being designed by Frida Escobedo, the first woman ever to envision a wing at the 154-year-old New York museum. Some $550 million in private donations have been raised to support the creation of the wing, which is officially set to open in 2030.

Officially titled the Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Wing after two donors who gave the Met $125 million, the wing has been in the works since 2014. Its towering cost kept the museum from realizing its vision for a renovated home for modern and contemporary art, though at long last, the Met appears to have raised enough money to see the project through.

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Masterpieces from the 20th and 21st centuries will be on view in some 70,000 square feet of gallery space. Among the artworks expected to be housed there are important Cubist treasures donated to the Met by Leonard Lauder in 2013.

In its current plan, the wing will vastly expand the Met’s space for modern and contemporary art, growing the existing wing’s gallery space by about 50 percent.

Beyond the monumental scale of the addition, the wing will also allow the museum to do some behind-the-scenes upkeep. Accessibility will be prioritized during the creation of this new wing, the museum said, highlighting the fact that the current of the modern and contemporary galleries hinder both visitors and Met workers alike in certain areas, whether because of lighting issues, spatial constraints, or stairs. Moreover, its construction will enable the Met to bring on 4,000 union workers.

The design itself appears to reflect the Met’s ambitions of globalizing its modern and contemporary art galleries, which have historically skewed American and European, as is the case at many major US institutions. The Met began to remedy this in a public way during the mid- and late 2010s with its short-lived Met Breuer annex, housed in the Whitney Museum’s former headquarters, where the Met staged surveys for international artists such as Mrinalini Mukherjee, Lygia Pape, and Marisa Merz.

Escobedo’s design seems to hint at further movement on that front. The Met’s announcement noted that the Mexican architect’s facade will feature a limestone celosía, which the museum described as an “architectural screen that references a universal architectural language spanning multiple cultures and centuries.”

Her plan includes a cafe to be located on the wing’s fifth floor, as well as a relocated sculpture garden. Formerly, the sculpture garden, which has played host to large-scale works by Jeff Koons, Imran Qureshi, Adrián Villar Rojas, and more, was sited on the museum’s fifth-floor rooftop; it has been a site of pilgrimage for summertime visitors. Now, that sculpture garden will be on a fourth-floor terrace of Escobedo’s wing.

Max Hollein, the Met’s director, said in a statement, “As stewards of one of the most outstanding collections of 20th- and 21st-century art, The Met has a responsibility to New York City and the world 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. Escobedo’s elegant, contemporary design reflects not only an understanding of architectural history, materiality, and artistic expression but also a deep appreciation for The Met’s mission, collection, and visitors.”

Eric Adams, New York City’s Mayor, praised the planned wing as “a bold endeavor to expand our understanding of the role of art in New York’s culture and our society.”