Met Museum appoints architect in Mexico City to lead new major project

mexican architect Frida Escobedowho was 38 years old and was the youngest architect to design the Serpentine Pavilion in 2018, was chosen to design the The Metropolitan Museum of ArtToday, Sunday, the museum announced its new $500 million Modern and Contemporary Art Pavilion.

“It’s a very important committee,” said the museum director, Max Hollin, in a phone interview. “This group will continue to grow larger than any other region.”

“It’s a powerful voice in architectural discourse,” he added of Escobedo. “It produces very contemporary buildings rooted in a modern canon.”

Escobedo, 42, is a surprising choice for such a major mission, given that it is relatively young, has designed mostly temporary structures and is not a household name. But she said she was not disappointed or excited about the job.

“I love challenges,” she said in a phone interview from her home in Mexico City. “One of the commissions that any architect dreams of is to design an institution of relevance and relevance to the Met.”

While Escobedo said it was too early to discuss her design ideas for the new wing, she said it was “important for her to connect with the rest of the museum, connect with the park, connect with the city and also represent New York’s cultural diversity.”

The new wing has been closely watched by the art world, given that the Met has lagged behind in the subject area and its current space for modern and contemporary art has long been considered a problem. The museum also forced to delay the projectafter it was announced before sufficient funds were raised.

Last fall, the project finally received the main gift it had been longing for when its longtime guardian, Oscar L. In the history of the museum. The suite will be named Tangs for at least 50 years.

The museum looked at four other architectural firms: Ensemble Studio, Lacaton and Vasal, Soil and David Chipperfield Architects, whose previous design inflated the price tag to $800 million. In a later deleted tweet, Chipperfield posted that he was “sad to end our 7-year relationship” with the Met and congratulated Escobedo, wishing her “the best for the project.”

At a time when the cultural world has become more sensitive to issues of equality, Escobedo appears to represent an important step forward for women of color. But Daniel H. Weiss, the museum’s president and CEO, said that doesn’t affect the Met’s decision. “It’s great that it brings variety,” he said, “but that wasn’t a selection criterion.”

Weiss added that Escobedo was the right person to design “a distinctive building that speaks to the art of our time” and that he expects the project to be completed in about seven years.

Born in 1979 in Mexico City, Escobedo studied architecture at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City before completing his master’s degree in Art, design and the public domain at Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

For Escobedo, who founded her architectural practice in Mexico City in 2006, the Met will be her largest cultural project to date, an order of magnitude different. Her previous work has featured numerous pavilions and other temporary structures, such as those of the Lisbon Architecture Triennale, the Chicago Architecture Biennale, and Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

she has crooked wing In London, chosen by Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director of Serpentine Gallery, it features a partially enclosed patio framing a triangular pool, with lattice walls made of gray concrete roof tiles and a reflective curved canopy.

Its other notable projects include an expansion La Talira Siqueiros In Cuernavaca (2012), Mexico, a museum, workshop, and residence for artists was the home and studio of muralist David Alvaro Siqueiros. She also designed a renovation Boca Chica Hotel (2008), a popular destination for Hollywood celebrities in the 1950s, and eco suite (2010), a site-specific installation, designed for the Museo Experimental El Eco.

She is currently working – with Handel Architects in New York City – on Ray Harlema joint venture with the National Black Theater that will include residential, retail and performance spaces.

In 2019, Escobedo was honored as an International Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects and her studio was named one of100+ Best Architecture FirmsBy Domus Architecture Magazine.

She has taught at Columbia, Harvard, and Rice and currently teaches at Yale University.

The Met project will create 80,000 square feet of galleries and public spaces, providing an opportunity for the museum to tell the story of modern and contemporary art more fully than it has in the past. In addition to modern and contemporary works, The Tang Wing will include photographs, drawings, and prints.

Hollin said the new wing would not offer a “linear path,” but instead a “more open building structure” with galleries that vary in height, size and exposure to light. At a time like museums Museum of Modern Art Rethinking the presentation of art, including presenting multiple perspectives and putting different genres side by side, the new Met Pavilion will also seek to expand the narrative, Hollein said: “Our art presentation will be multicultural.”