Continuing Education: Remaking the Metropolitan Museum of Art

For a $2 billion undertaking encompassing multiple projects within a 2.1 million-square-foot complex, the people directing the ongoing building efforts at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art talk a lot about the impact of the individual hand. Details reveal purpose. Small things highlight big intentions. Max Hollein, the museum’s director and CEO, speaks of selecting materials and how these decisions express the institution’s value of environmental responsibility and social inclusion. Jhaelen Hernandez-Eli, the vice president of construction, elaborates on the practice in the Sahel region of sub-Saharan Africa of refinishing houses each year with a new coat of mud—linking the hand-application of wet dirt on these residences to the craftsmanship of the people rejuvenating the 154-year-old museum. “The people who build our walls are as important as what we put on them,” says Hernandez-Eli.

• The replacement of 30,000 square feet of skylights above the European Paintings Galleries, which was overseen by architects at BBB and engineers at Kohler Ronan, Arup, and WJE and completed near the end of 2023
• The wholesale renovation of the 40,000-square-foot Michael C. Rockefeller Wing designed by Kulapat Yantrasast of Why Architecture and BBB, scheduled to open in May 2025
• The transformation of the 15,000-square-foot Ancient Near Eastern and Cypriot Art Galleries by Nader Tehrani of NADAAA and Moody Nolan, set to reopen in 2026
• The creation of a new 11,500-square-foot special-exhibitions gallery off the museum’s Great Hall, the reimagining of dining and retail spaces below the main floor, and the conversion of an employee entrance at 83rd Street into a major public entry off the street-level plaza facing Fifth Avenue. Designed by Peterson Rich Office (PRO) and BBB, the special-exhibitions gallery will open in 2026, followed by the street-level retail, which the two firms are also designing. The architect for the dining area has yet to be announced.

Most visitors to the Met think of it as one very big building, but it’s actually 21 attached structures erected over the course of 144 years. So different parts of the complex require repair at different times. Balancing the needs of the institution’s physical fabric, the visitors’ experience, and changes in curatorial approaches to the vast collection (1.5 million works of art spanning 5,000 years) involves a tricky act of juggling many programmatic balls and sharp-edged disciplinary knives at one time. Donors often want to fund projects with high visibility—such as new galleries and wings—while aging infrastructure goes untended.

“At many institutions, special exhibitions represent the most current thinking about art and curation,” says Hollein, “while collections are often decades out of date.” The Met, says Hollein, “is committed to displaying its collections in a contemporary way. We take seriously not just how we collect, but how we display. What are the narratives, the stories we tell?”

While the Met’s collections keep growing, its physical footprint is strictly limited. The museum rents its facilities from the City of New York and is not allowed to encroach any farther than it does on Central Park, within which it sits. Changes to its complex must pass muster with a bevy of government agencies, including the Parks Department and the Landmarks Preservation Commission. Internal voices must be heard as well, including curators, conservators, scientific researchers, exhibition designers, and maintenance staff. Hernandez-Eli talks about the Met as a city, with neighborhoods, streets, plazas, and plenty of stakeholders making their voices heard.

The Met’s first master plan, developed by Calvert Vaux in 1880, oriented the building toward Central Park, which Vaux had designed with Frederick Law Olmsted. In 1902, Richard Morris Hunt turned the museum to Fifth Avenue with his imposing Beaux-Arts facade, broad entry stair, and Great Hall. Later wings by McKim, Mead and White extended the building to the north and south. In 1967, Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates began work on a master plan that would insert new geometrically bold wings within the museum’s historic fabric. Key elements of the Roche Dinkeloo scheme included the Robert Lehman Wing (1975); the wing formerly named Sackler (1978) enclosing the Temple of Dendur; the American Wing (1980), with its period rooms; the Rockefeller Wing (1982), displaying art from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas; the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing (1987), showcasing Modern and contemporary art; and finally the Henry R. Kravis Wing (1991), offering European sculpture and decorative arts.

One of the challenges facing the Met today is working with all the layers of construction set by previous architects and adding new ones in a way that is legible and addresses today’s critical issues. “We are moving from being a docent—an institution that tells you how to look at art—to being a convenor, a place that brings you in contact with art and allows you to be part of a discourse,” states Hollein. This change manifests itself in the current building projects, he says. “We want them to reflect different voices, different backgrounds, different cultural experiences. When visitors move through the museum, we want them to see spaces that invite cultural exchange and show the interconnectedness of different places,” explains Hollein. Instead of a building with thresholds between wings, he wants to create a museum that is more fluid and emphasizes relationships between different civilizations and eras.

Hollein (whose father was Hans Hollein, the Pritzker Prize–winning architect from Vienna) has worked closely with Hernandez-Eli, an architect, to develop a construction program that creates a collection of buildings rather than the kind of grand scheme that Roche Dinkeloo devised for the museum back in the 1960s. “We don’t want one firm doing everything,” says Hollein. “We want different perspectives.”

Three years before Hollein was appointed director of the Met in 2018, the museum hired David Chipperfield to design a new building to replace its Modern and Contemporary wing. With a stellar list of arts projects in his portfolio—including the Neues Museum in Berlin and the Jumex Museum in Mexico City—Chipperfield was a safe choice. As Chipperfield worked on his design, the museum transferred its Modern and Contemporary Collection into what had been the Whitney Museum on Madison Avenue in 2016 and dubbed it the Met Breuer. The plan was to move 20th- and 21st-century art back to Fifth Avenue when Chipperfield’s wing was completed. But the museum was unable to raise enough funding for the new structure, so it let go of its lease on the Breuer building and brought modern and contemporary art back to its original galleries in the Fifth Avenue building.

When Hollein and Hernandez-Eli turned their attention to the Modern and Contemporary wing, they started from square one with a new search for an architect. They put together a short list that included Chipperfield and a group of younger practices: New York–based SO-IL, Madrid-based Ensamble Studio, Paris-based Lacaton and Vassal, and Mexico City–based Frida Escobedo. They spent nearly half a year doing workshops with each firm, simulating a client-architect relationship to understand how such a collaboration might actually work. In 2022, they hired Escobedo for what is now named the Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Wing. Escobedo, who had launched her firm in 2006 and made her first big splash on the international scene in 2018 with her design of the Serpentine Pavilion in London, was not well-known in the U.S. at the time. Explaining the Met’s selection, Hernandez-Eli said in 2022 that Escobedo’s work “draws from multiple cultural narratives, values local resources, and addresses the urgent socioeconomic inequities and environmental crises that define our time.”

The process for selecting architects for the other projects at the Met was less time-intensive. But it too emphasized a desire to bring in new talent rather than firms with long lists of museum projects to their credit. Kulapat Yantrasast of Why Architecture had designed several museum buildings and gallery renovations but was still making a name for himself, when he was hired to work with BBB on the Rockefeller Wing in 2018, shortly before Hollein became director. Nader Tehrani was finishing up his term as dean of the school of architecture at Cooper Union—and his firm NADAAA was still known for projects that didn’t play it safe—when he was given the task of rethinking the Galleries for Ancient Near Eastern and Cypriot Art. Peterson and Rich had opened their Brooklyn-based practice in 2014 and were developing a reputation for inserting new elements into historic structures when they were selected by the Met at the end of 2023. The message was clear: the Met wanted to work with architects who would come to the table with fresh ideas and approaches. “The Met can be a petri dish for experimentation,” says Hernandez-Eli. “Our goal is to transform the institution.” By pairing most of the young (ish) firms with BBB, the Met would ensure that a trusted partner with deep knowledge of the museum would be involved.

Rather than a particular style or aesthetic, what ties the various projects together is a set of shared values, such as prioritizing environmental responsibility and social equity. Pursuing them would not only reduce the museum’s carbon footprint and employ minority-owned firms, but would cut energy costs, make the institution more resilient in an age of climate change, and engage communities that in the past may have seen the Met as an alien presence in the city.

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The project to replace skylights (1) above the European Paintings Galleries (2) included systems upgrades to reduce condensation in the attic spaces. Images courtesy Metropolitan Museum, click to enlarge.

All the current projects involve extensive upgrades to or replacement of aging infrastructure, most of which is unseen by visitors but essential to the operation of the museum. For example, the skylights above the 45 galleries dedicated to European paintings from 1300 to 1800 were originally constructed by McKim, Mead and White in 1907 and last replaced in the years between 1939 and 1952. They leaked water and energy. Their repair was “decades overdue,” says Richard Southwick, a partner and director of historic preservation at BBB. To prevent condensation in the galleries, the air in the attic areas under the skylights was superheated to at least 100 degrees Fahrenheit and relative humidity kept at 35 percent, wasting considerable energy.

BBB, Kohler Ronan, and other consultants considered various options. Eventually, they decided to replace the existing single-pane, corrugated wire-glass panels with laminated insulated-glass units equipped with thermally broken aluminum framing and interior drainage channels. They considered triple-glazed units, but went with double glazing because it weighed less and wouldn’t require new steel supports. Directly above the galleries, they swapped in new glass “laylights” that diffuse daylight before it reaches the paintings below. They also installed a manually operated system of curved, perforated aluminum sun louvers right below the skylights, allowing the museum to adjust the amount of daylight coming in.

While protecting the artwork from UV rays and keeping galleries at 70 degrees Fahrenheit and 50 percent relative humidity, the new system of skylights, louvers, and laylights retains the dynamic quality of light previously found in the galleries, allowing visitors to experience the movement of the sun and clouds. Curators felt that daylit galleries were important here, because the artists who created the paintings had worked in daylit studios, says Henry Miller, a principal at BBB. Working with engineers at Arup, the architects built a quarter-scale model of a portion of a gallery with the attic and skylights above, to study light transmittance and color rendering. The model included miniature reproductions of the paintings and was large enough for a person to stick his or her head and torso inside.

The $150 million skylight project also entailed a major overhaul of the museum’s mechanical and electrical systems, which had developed piecemeal as various parts of the complex were built. Engineers at Kohler Ronan designed a long-term plan to reduce the number of chilled-water plants and move them from the basement to the ground floor, where they would be above flood waters. As in a game of three-dimensional chess, each move required several others to happen. Putting a north-side chiller plant on street level, for example, meant relocating trade shops to the third floor, connecting the plant to new rooftop cooling towers, and eventually sequencing a series of projects that will bring a new south-side chiller into operation. It also required some structural changes—including adding 90-foot-long steel girders—that engineers at Thornton Tomasetti designed to support the new cooling towers, which will sit above the existing Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium. The goal of all these efforts was to improve energy efficiency, better serve the museum’s many wings, and provide a certain amount of redundancy in case of emergency or to accommodate future construction (such as the Tang Wing). Kohler Ronan also oversaw the realignment of all electrical servers, again aiming to create a better balance and some redundancy.

To reduce condensation in the attic, BBB and Kohler Ronan brought in outside air at the new skylights, installed dew point sensors and a desiccant dehumidification system, and better controlled air pressure between the attic and the galleries below. According to Kohler Ronan, the entire skylight-replacement project is expected to reduce annual expenditures on energy by $398,000, nearly a third of the previous figure, and reduce annual energy-related CO₂ emissions from 2,410 metric tons to 1,820. The firm uses computational fluid dynamics to figure out where to put air supply, air returns, and venting networks—a challenge in a museum where curators often want large, open galleries and no one wants to see such prosaic elements, says Rory Ronan, a firm partner.

For the Rockefeller Wing, Yantrasast had to devise a new logic for moving through three different collections—Africa, Oceania, and Ancient America—that had been lumped together as non-Western or “primitive” art. “We needed to give each its rightful place,” says Yantrasast. “In Africa alone there are around 200 different cultures,” he adds. To define spaces, he varied ceilings and enclosures for the 16 galleries, tailoring them to the needs of the art. For example, in the African galleries, he designed a main promenade defined by a gently arching ceiling with “chapels” on either side. To accommodate fragile textile pieces and small gold items from the Ancient Americas, he lowered ceilings and crafted intimate displays for the objects. He identified two cultural approaches in the Americas: inward-looking (the pyramid) and outward-oriented (the zocolo). In the Oceania areas of the wing, freestanding walls protect carved wood poles from the Asmat people from too much daylight, while also providing spaces for living artists from the region to create changing installations.

Yantrasast applied what he calls “acupuncture architecture” to improve the flow of space throughout the wing and relieve pressure points that had plagued it in the past. Encouraged by curators, he is linking the wing to other parts of the museum to underline connections between cultures, such as those between African and Greek and Roman art. He employed a neutral palette of materials—limestone, stucco with an egg-finish, and textured plaster. Instead of replacing existing flooring, which is the default approach to renovations, he decided to refinish the pink salt-and-pepper granite and change its surface from shiny (and corporate-looking) to rough and more crafted. This saved the museum $5 million and acknowledged the carbon embodied in the existing building. It also preserves a link to the Roche Dinkeloo design. At the start of the project, Yantrasast went to New Haven to speak with Roche, who died in 2019. “I respect Roche’s work and want to celebrate his legacy.”

Although the wing’s most prominent feature is a sloping 200-foot-long, 60-foot-high glass wall, the galleries were often gloomy because curators would pull down the blinds to protect the art from the sun. BBB, Thornton Tomasetti, and Arup have redesigned the south-facing wall so it looks the same on the exterior (a requirement to get approval from the Landmarks Commission and the Parks Department), but works better for birds outside and people inside. Glass closest to the floor is clear to provide views to the park and bring in daylight, but gets more opaque as it approaches the top. Triple-glazed, it now has layers with frits (to alert birds) and low-E coatings (to reduce UV rays), while maintaining the old color rendering. Blinds can slide down to cover the clear glass after visitors leave the museum or when daylight is too intense. Significant changes were also made to the way the glass meets the existing steel structure supporting it, says Eli Gottlieb, managing principal at Thornton Tomasetti.

For the Ancient Near Eastern and Cypriot Art galleries on the second floor of the museum, NADAAA is exploring ways to bring the two collections—which had previously been separate—into dialogue, both spatially and curatorially. They are working with the notion of a torus or donut-shaped path flowing from one area to another and are employing a monumental ramp to stitch together the two collections and turn an ADA problem into a design feature. Linking to nearby galleries, such as those for Asian art on the north side of the Great Hall and Islamic art and European paintings to the south, the $40 million project will present a transcultural narrative. “We’re making connections across time, space, and culture that had once been obscured,” says Tehrani. A curving, ribbonlike ceiling will be suspended from above to define circulation and hide mechanical equipment, lighting, sprinklers, and other service systems. Tehrani is treating floors as “carpets” with sometimes richly hued materials such as terrazzo to evoke the colors that once adorned some of the sculptures and reliefs in the collection. “We want to create an immersive experience and establish a relationship between the human body and the individual artifacts on display,” says Tehrani.

PRO and BBB are working on a series of projects that will turn a street-level employee entrance at 83rd Street and Fifth Avenue into a major public entry, convert some area there now into retail space, insert a new stair to the Great Hall one floor above, and transform the existing Met store adjacent to the Great Hall into a special-exhibitions gallery that will display the Costume Institute’s annual spring show and at other times exhibitions from other curatorial departments. “We’re dealing with a palimpsest here—layers of Met history that have accumulated over time,” says Nathan Rich, a partner at PRO. Some earlier elements that had been altered in previous renovations will be returned and transformed. For example, the original 83rd Street entrance designed by McKim, Mead and White had three doors but was reduced to one later on, and will once again feature three.

PRO’s new stair connecting the street level to the Great Hall will be located close to where one had originally been, but will be bigger and more prominent. “It will rescript how people move through the museum and become a central part of the visitor experience,” explains Miriam Peterson, a partner at PRO. It will also offer views from the new street-level entry area up to the Great Hall’s domes, helping visitors orient themselves and navigate the museum. Coincidentally, PRO recently completed an arts building for Wesleyan University that establishes a dialogue with a campus plan by Roche Dinkeloo and a pair of McKim, Mead and White buildings. “Those firms are architectural ghosts hanging out in our office,” laughs Peterson.

For her work on the new Tang Wing, Escobedo is approaching the Met “as a tapestry with some places of friction and some of continuity,” says the architect, who opened a New York office for the project and now spends about half her time there. Still in schematics, her design won’t be revealed until 2025. The existing wing by Roche Dinkeloo wasn’t designed for modern or contemporary art, so it has always struggled in its current role. Rather than create large, open spaces for art, Escobedo says she is planning galleries of different sizes to accommodate works that range from large pieces of sculpture to photography, painting, textiles, and new media.

“I grew up in Mexico City, which is known for cultural layering and juxtapositions,” says Escobedo. “New York is a city of immigrants and shares many of those characteristics.”

Without discussing particulars of her design, Escobedo says she is exploring “ideas of porosity” and how a building’s architecture can encourage “exchange and absorb influences without changing its shape.” Monumental places like the Met can be intimidating, but “porosity can make them softer, more gentle,” she explains. That strategy can also help bring new groups of people into the museum.

Although no decisions have been made, she plans to use simple but rich materials and “do a lot with a little.” She hopes to source products and materials locally, as much as possible, and engage with local craftspeople. She will make connections between her wing and galleries of European art to the north and the Rockefeller Wing to the south, with its collections of art from Africa, Oceania, and the Ancient Americas. To help visitors make their way through the Tang Wing, she expects to use daylight and visual connections to Central Park. Set at the southwest corner of the Met, the Tang Wing enjoys “one of the most privileged locations at the museum.”

An institution with a 154-year history, the Met is initiating an ambitious intergenerational dialogue among architects, curators, and visitors. It is strengthening connections between cultures and periods on both a global and local scale. Right now, it’s halfway through the process—a multibillion-dollar undertaking that will shape its facilities and its brand for decades to come.