Met Museum: The Latest Architecture and News

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has unveiled the design for a new wing dedicated to its 20th- and 21st-century art collection. Architect Frida Escobedo, the first woman to design a Met wing, is leading the project. The Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Wing will increase gallery space by almost 50 percent, adding over 70,000 square feet. This expansion will address accessibility issues, improve infrastructure, and enhance the sustainability of the building. The opening of the new wing is anticipated in 2030.

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Sotheby's has revealed that Pritzker Prize laureate Herzog & de Meuron will renovate the iconic modernist Breuer Building. The auction house has successfully acquired the building, situated on Madison Avenue, New York City, from the Whitney Museum. Previously, the Breuer building was home to the Whitney, later accommodating the Frick Collection and serving as a venue for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's modern and contemporary pieces. The renovation will include an upgraded sales room for Sotheby's, alongside new exhibition and dining areas. The project, developed together with PBDW Architects, is slated for completion by the fall of 2025.

Architect Tadao Ando has been commissioned to design this year’s Costume Institute exhibition highlighting the work of Karl Lagerfeld. The opening of the exhibition titled “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty” was marked by the world-renown Met Gala, a fundraising event attended by celebrities and personalities perceived to be culturally relevant in the fashion scene. Perceived as a thematic and conceptual essay on Lagerfeld’s work, rather than a traditional retrospective, the exhibition aims to illustrate the designer’s method of creative expression and its significance in the industry.

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has selected Mexican architect Frida Escobedo to design the new $500 million modern and contemporary art wing. The Met does not have, until now, a thematic area that would house pieces corresponding to this temporality in art.

From the 14th to the 16th century, Iran had witnessed growth and affluence under the Timurid and Safavid dynasties. During this period, many mosques, palaces and pavilions were commissioned and contributed to sites of veneration and pilgrimage. However not many of these key architectural realms survived and few historical texts exist to relay the intricacies of the architecture of that time.

What remained were some dispersed manuscripts from the Shahnameh and other renowned illustrated stories or poems that represented the moral values and aesthetics of that period. Inadvertently these initial renders became the main representation of a unique and fantastic Islamic architecture.

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MetPublications is a portal to The Met’s online publishing program, containing more than 1,500 books and other publications from the museum from the last fifty years. It includes descriptions for most titles as well as information on the author, publication reviews, and links to other similar titles.

The contents of many publications can be viewed online or downloaded in a PDF format. Readers can also search for works of art from The Met’s past collections. New titles are frequently added, expanding the online catalog.

Check out some of the architecture-related publications below and find more at the MetPublications Portal, here.

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With the conclusion of this year’s Met Gala, on Thursday the public will have their first look at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new spring show, "Manus x Machina". According to the museum, “[the exhibition] will explore [an] ongoing dichotomy, in which hand and machine are presented as discordant tools in the creative process, and question the relationship and distinction between haute couture and ready-to-wear.” Occurring in the museum’s Robert Lehman Wing, a 1975 expansion by Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo, the exhibition design has been developed by Shohei Shigematsu of OMA New York. Organized by Andrew Bolton, the Curator of The Costume Institute, the exhibition will feature over 100 samples of “haute couture and avant-garde ready-to-wear, dating from an 1880s Worth gown to a 2015 Chanel suit.” Read on for a small preview of the exhibition, fashion, and spectacle of Manus x Machina, on view from May 5 - August 14.