Met Museum Unveils Design for New Modern Wing

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.”

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.