Archinect - News

Iconic American interior designer, businesswoman, and fashion icon Iris Apfel dies at 102

2024-03-06T11:18:00-05:00

Iris Apfel, an iconoclast interior designer who drew praise for her style and fashion collection, passed away last week at the age of 102. The New York Times is reporting on her influence in the design world this week following her death on March 1st.

Through the work of her label Old World Weavers, the Queens native became a commercial success designing the White House's interiors and remained an influence in that realm for many subsequent generations. Apfel picked up her famous eye from her father, who designed and installed mirrors during New York City’s first skyscraper boom. Throughout her lucky turn at celebrity, she remained a vocal advocate for quality. She also taught a textile design course at the University of Texas at Austin in 2011.

“There’s very little creativity left. Everybody copies everybody else,” she said to AnOther magazine in 2018. “I don’t know whether everybody wants the same or the designers give it to them – I have no idea, I’ve been out of it for too long ...

Peterson Rich Office will lead major renovation of the Met's key public areas

2023-12-01T17:09:00-05:00

Peterson Rich Office (PRO) has been announced as the architect of a major renovation at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City that will overhaul its Fifth Avenue entrance, gift shop, and other public areas over a period of several years.

The Met says this work will be conducted in two phases: the new gallery will be enacted first near the Great Hall, followed by the renovation of the outside plaza area and a reconfiguration of existing dining areas.

The gallery will be completed in 2026, resulting in an 11,500-square-foot space for The Costume Institute’s annual spring show and other curatorial activities. The former employee's entrance at 83rd Street and Fifth Avenue will also be remade to allow better public access to the building. Beyer Blinder Belle is attached to the project as the executive architect, following their renovation of the museum’s European paintings galleries that was completed this month.

Related on Archinect: The Met's Jhaelen Hernandez-Eli details hi...

The Met's Jhaelen Hernandez-Eli details his work as Vice President of Capital Projects to the New York Times

2023-11-15T19:24:00-05:00

The New York Times recently spoke to Jhaelen Hernandez-Eli about his work as the Vice President of Capital Projects for NYC's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

A Harvard GSD alum and former Associate Principal at Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Hernandez-Eli had previously worked in design and construction for the New York City Economic Development Corporation before joining the institution, where he is now responsible for a $2 billion capital improvements initiative that will prove to be one of the defining aspects of Director Max Hollein's tenure.

“The emphasis on environmental performance and dealing with the climate crisis is not separate and apart from the discussion around aesthetics,” Hernandez-Eli told NYT Art & Culture contributor Ted Loos last month. “I think that oftentimes those two things get divorced. You’re either focused on what a thing looks like or how a thing performs. Our argument here is that they’re not mutually exclusive, they’re merged.”

Previously on Archinect: Frida E...

The Met unveils designs for new children's learning center ahead of September opening

2023-06-14T18:49:00-04:00

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has set a date for the opening of the new 81st Street Studio children’s education space created by KOKO Architecture + Design.

This September 9th will see the daylong dedication festival for the new learning center, which takes over a renovated space in the museum’s Harold D. Uris Center for Education. The 3,500-square-foot design will offer free activities to children ages 3–11 and their caregivers, offering itself as an “interactive space that reimagines how the Museum can inspire exploration of its encyclopedic collection, amplify curiosity, and create new experiences for The Met’s youngest visitors.”

Museum director Max Hollein says: ”This is a project that was made possible by so many and with strong support to create something unique for our younger audiences.”

Rendering: Brick Visual. Image: KOKO Architecture + Design, courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

“Education is a critical — and very exciting — part of The Met’s mission, ...

Tadao Ando accused of copying artist Willie Cole's designs with recycled Met Gala chandelier

2023-05-03T11:16:00-04:00

Last night, a star-studded crowd trickled into the Metropolitan Museum of Art for its annual gala beneath a gargantuan chandelier made of what appeared to be plastic water bottles. After the event took place, several members of the art community noticed what appeared to be suspicious similarities between the chandelier and the plastic works of American artist Willie Cole.

Cole’s work is included in the museum’s permanent collection, and the large-scale chandeliers in question were profiled just two months ago by the New York Times. The large-scale pieces were made of nearly 6,000 individual water bottles and were created to instigate a conversation about the water crisis afflicting Cole’s hometown of Newark, New Jersey, in 2019. Some have found them comparable on social media.

The pieces were also profiled in Vogue yesterday, which quoted event planner Raul Àvila as saying: "We wanted to find a way to create a sustainable design that would implement the bottles into a breathtaking installation unlike anything we’ve done before."

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Willie cole (@williecoleart)

The Met announces Nairy Baghramian for its Fall 2023 Facade Commission

2023-04-11T13:57:00-04:00

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has announced Iranian-born German artist Nairy Baghramian as the next participant in its Fall 2023 Facade Commission series.

Baghramian follows Carol Bove, Wangechi Mutu, and last year’s Hew Locke for the fourth installment of the series, which first began in 2019 under the auspices of museum Director Max Hollein.

The museum says: “These projects are the latest in The Met’s series of contemporary commissions in which the Museum invites artists to create new works of art, establishing a dialogue between the artist's practice, The Met collection, the physical Museum, and The Met's audiences.”

Baghramian, also the winner of the 2022 Nasher Prize, will install four abstract polychromatic sculptures as part of the commission. Working in the blank niches left behind after Richard Hunt Morris was unable to complete his work on the museum in 1902, the sculptures are said to have components that evoke images of flotsam and will be titled Scratching the Back.

R...

Frida Escobedo speaks to Vogue on her plans for The Met expansion

2023-03-24T12:24:00-04:00

One year after acclaimed Mexican architect Frida Escobedo replaced David Chipperfield as the designer for the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art's $500 million modern and contemporary wing extension, Escobedo has spoken to Vogue about her vision fo the scheme. When completed, the project is expected to comprise 80,000 square feet of more accessible galleries and public spaces.

“My first thoughts were that this wing is quite isolated,” Escobedo told Vogue’s Dodie Kazanjian on a tour of the existing museum. “It feels like a separate part of the museum, and the question is, how can we integrate it more?”

While Escobedo is not due to present a design concept until June, she revealed to Vogue that her vision for the scheme will include some form of alteration to the building’s orientation. “Right now, the building is facing just one way, Fifth Avenue — the grand staircase, the Great Hall, and you can go in three directions to Egypt, to Greece, and to Europe,” Escobedo told the magazine....

Tadao Ando’s tribute to Karl Lagerfeld will take over the Met’s Costume Institute this spring

2023-03-23T17:16:00-04:00

The three-decade professional relationship between Karl Lagerfeld and Pritzker winner Tadao Ando will be continued in a new exhibition designed by the architect for the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Opening to coincide with the Lagerfeld-themed Met Gala during the first week of May, Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty promises to be a treatise on Lagerfeld’s work organized around the duality between straight lines and the “Serpentine line” first theorized in William Hogarth’s 1753 essay The Analysis of Beauty.

The essay was supposedly an inspiration for the late fashion designer throughout his decorated career, the arch and milestones of which are covered in the introductory segment to the exhibition. This introduction will be followed by two galleries that hone in on themes derived from each type of line and are divided into nine ‘sublines’ included as examples of contradictory impulses throughout his friend’s long oeuvre.

Related on Archinect:...

Artist Hew Locke will activate the Met facade with a quartet of trophy-like reflections on the museum's history and collection

2022-04-11T15:31:00-04:00

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has announced that Hew Locke will be the next artist featured in its provocative Facade Commission series.

The Guyanese-British artist’s effort is titled “Gilt” and will follow recent interventions by Carol Bove and Wangechi Mutu for the third version of the commission, which was begun in 2019 as the museum looked for new ways to engage its collections, history, and neoclassical exterior with the public and its newfound mandate for institutional self-reflection.

Hew Locke. Photo copyright Danny Cozens, 2020.

Architect Richard Hunt Morris was never fully able to realize his vision for the museum’s facade by the time of its completion in 1902. As a result, four extended niches were left empty until the commission began and will now showcase a quartet of trophy-like sculptures from Locke that are “informed by [his] deep knowledge of the Met’s collection and […] reference the institution in ways both direct and indirect,” according to Director Max Hollein....

Designing for The Met: How hiring the right exhibition designers impacts the changing nature of museums

2022-03-30T20:00:00-04:00

New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art has made several big announces these past few months: From news of a $500 million wing expansion designed by Frida Escobedo, an upcoming rooftop installation from artist Lauren Halsey, to the museum's Ancient Near East and Cypriot Art gallery renovation led by NADAAA and Moody Nolan, The Met is setting its sights on what 2022 and beyond will bring.

Learning from the pandemic and the socio-economical events of 2020 and 2021, museum and exhibition design continues to evolve and change, hopefully for the better. As cultural institutions across the globe continue to reopen and prepare for another year of exhibitions, many dare to ask what the future of exhibition design will look like. Who are the future exhibition designers? What does it take for motivated individuals to work for one of today's leading museums?

The Met's "In America: A Lexicon of Fashion" exhibition. Depicted is a dress designed by international fashion designer and design a...

Local LA hero Lauren Halsey’s Met rooftop installation will focus on utopian architecture, Afrofuturism, and community

2022-03-15T20:36:00-04:00

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has announced the commission of artist Lauren Halsey for the tenth edition of its popular annual Roof Garden Commission series with a new work titled the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I).

The 34-year-old artist’s temporary installation will feature an inhabitable structure that at once weaves the museum’s ample holdings of Egyptian art with elements of her own personal history and visual inventory in order to create a “monument to living architecture” overlooking Central Park and Fifth Avenue.

Halsey is known for inspiring work that examines the shifting dynamic between architecture and community-building as influenced by her upbringing in and around South Central Los Angeles. Her installation is thus taken from the desire to produce, as Met director Max Hollein put it, “a powerful form of documentation” that engages with the history, iconography, and local material culture of the neighborhood remixed with ele...

Frida Escobedo has replaced David Chipperfield on the Met's $500 million modern and contemporary wing expansion

2022-03-14T14:56:00-04:00

Change at the top of the museum world as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has announced Mexican architect Frida Escobedo as its new designer of the forthcoming Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Wing for modern and contemporary art.

Escobedo now officially replaces David Chipperfield, who had been selected by then-director Thomas Campbell in 2015. An announcement from the museum noted that the new wing will encompass some 80,000 square feet of more accessible galleries and public space all made possible by the Tang’s contribution to the nearly $500 million total cost.

The 42-year-old’s work has thus far been defined most notably by her 2018 design for the Serpentine Pavilion and through her eponymous Mexico City-based practice, which has authored a wide range of projects that include everything from historic renovation of an iconic hotel in Acapulco to investigations into the lives of domestic workers in Mexico City, among other standout projects. Escobedo has held teaching ...

A terracotta block wall created by Mexican artist Héctor Zamora graces Met Museum roof

2020-08-31T16:30:00-04:00

A curving masonry block wall created by Mexican artist Héctor Zamora currently graces the rooftop terrace of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, which recently re-opened to the public after several months of COVID-19-related closures.

The installation is built from hundreds of extruded terracotta blocks "made of Mexican earth" that are stacked 11 feet high. The curving barrier is composed of blocks that have been turned on their side, exposing the complex patterning of the extrusion process used to create the units. This change in orientation allows for what would normally be seen as a solid mass to offer fragmented views through the barrier onto the surrounding landscape, be it the leafy trees in Central Park or the concrete, glass, and stone-wrapped towers that surround the museum.

A press release highlighting the installation tells us that the installation works to "create a response in viewers that communicates the impact of barriers: thwarting access to open, exp...

Met Breuer to serve as temporary installation site for Frick Collection

2020-06-24T17:26:00-04:00

The Met Breuer building in New York City is set to become the new temporary home to the Frick Collection as the Frick's flagship facilities undergo an expansion and renovation led by Selldorf Architects.

The Marcel Breuer-designed Brutalist style building was the original home of the Whitney Museum, which opened in 1930 and decamped to new Renzo Piano Building Workshop-designed facilities in 2015. Since then, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has been using the building to display a collection of Modern art and architecture exhibitions. The Breuer site was slated to run an exhibition of the works of Gerhard Richter through the summer, but the exhibition closed prematurely in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, Artnet reports.

Rendering showing proposed expansion of Frick Collection facilities. Image courtesy of Selldorf Architects.

The hotly debated $160 million Frick expansion project received a green light to move ahead in March. The project will bring 27,000 square feet of new s...

wHY Architecture to design the Met's ambitious $70 million Rockefeller Wing renovation

2018-11-21T14:04:00-05:00

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is moving forward with ambitious plans for a massive renovation and redesign of the New York museum's Michael C. Rockefeller Wing. Devoted to Africa, Oceania and the Americas, the forty-thousand-square-foot wing will be designed by the architect Kulapat Yantrasast and his firm wHY, and is expected to complete in 2023.

Over the years, Yantrasast's practice has built up a reputation for their modern and open art spaces. Their portfolio of projects includes the Speed Art Museum in Kentucky, Michigan's Grand Rapids Art Museum, and the Marciano Art Foundation in Los Angeles. His previous works at the Harvard Art Museums and at the Art Institute of Chicago, in particular, attracted the attention of the team at the Met. Currently, Mr. Yantrasast is working on the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, as well as a youth arts center in neighboring Oakland.

Americas Gallery looking South. Image by wHY.

"I love art and I love discoveries," says Yantrasast. "For that...

New York City's big art switcheroo involves The Met, The Frick, The Whitney, and a certain Marcel Breuer building

2018-09-21T19:01:00-04:00

Henry Clay Frick’s venerable Old Master paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints and porcelain seem destined for a change of scene. In an unusual game of musical chairs, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Frick Collection announced today (21 September) that the Met will vacate the Brutalist Breuer building on Madison Avenue in 2020. Its departure will make way for the Frick to move in late that year while its mansion undergoes a renovation and expansion five blocks away.

Click here to catch up with Archinect's coverage of the not entirely undramatic Frick Collection expansion saga.

A full-scale replica of the "Psycho" house touches down on the roof of the Met

2016-04-19T15:45:00-04:00

For the past few years, the roof garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art has supported major, site-specific art installations. The sweeping rooftop perched above Manhattan's 5th Avenue has previously seen works by Pierre Huyghe, Dan Graham, and Tomas Saraceno, among other. This summer, a full-scale replica of the famous Bates Mansion from Alfred Hitchcock's classic film Psycho will serve as the background of many a selfie (and hopefully achieve a bit more too).

A project by the artist Cornelia Parker, Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) also marks one of the first major achievements of Beatrice Galilee since becoming the Met's first-ever curator of architecture.

For related articles, check out these links:

Shohei Shigematsu of OMA transforms the Met for the spring Costume Institute exhibit

2016-04-19T12:58:00-04:00

NOT MANY ARCHITECTS get to reshape a wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But Shohei Shigematsu, who runs the New York branch of Rem Koolhaas’s Rotterdam-based firm, OMA, has done precisely that. This month he converts a skylit, double-height section of the museum—the 1970s Robert Lehman Wing—into a graceful, cathedral-like setting for Manus x Machina, the Costume Institute’s spring show, opening May 5.

The exhibit, curated by Andrew Bolton, considers "the founding of the haute couture in the 19th century, when the sewing machine was invented, and the emergence of a distinction between the hand (manus) and the machine (machina) at the onset of industrialization and mass production."

Accordingly, the organizers wanted an exhibition design that blends the analog and the mechanical. Shigematsu's intervention is intended to "soften" the existing brick-and-stone of the 1970's-era Robert Lehman wing, which was designed by Kevin Roche, John Dinkeloo and Associates.

Interested in other collaborations between the sartorial world and architecture? Check out these links:

As the Met moves into the old Whitney, can it shrug off the iconic building's associations with its former tenant?

2016-02-16T17:13:00-05:00

On March 18, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art opens an annex at Madison Avenue and 75th Street in Manhattan, it will be attempting to shrug off the ghost of a museum past. The specter is the Whitney Museum of American Art, which called the iconic Marcel Breuer building on that corner home for nearly five decades. In an eight-year deal, the Met is leasing the Breuer building from the Whitney— which relocated to its dazzling new Renzo Piano–designed home last year...

The Breuer-designed building will house some of the Met's modern and contemporary collection. But shrugging off the association between the Brutalist masterpiece and its former tenant may prove a tough task. For many, nothing say's "the Whitney" more than those protruding windows...

For related coverage, check out some of these older articles:

Undisciplining the discipline: Beatrice Galilee @ SCI-Arc

2015-12-09T19:49:00-05:00

Exhibiting architecture is a notoriously difficult and contentious task. After all, how do you represent a spatial practice without neglecting the very qualities that made it worth representing in the first place? Nonetheless, it has a long history – extending at least as far back as the Enlightenment, according to the historian Barry Bergdoll.

Still, there’s likely never been a period with more exhibits, biennials, triennials than the last few decades. Just about every major city in the world, from Venice to Chicago, Oslo to Jakarta, now hosts some big architecture event. Beatrice Galilee, a trained architect and the newly-appointed curator of architecture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, has played a significant role in shaping and pushing the boundaries of this practice. In a talk delivered last night at SCI-Arc, she relayed some of the major – and often controversial – moves made over the course of her trajectory to becoming the first-ever architecture curator at th...

The Met selects David Chipperfield to design its new museum wing

2015-03-12T14:35:00-04:00

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has named the architect for the institution's latest expansion project: David Chipperfield, the British master of elegance with offices in London, Berlin, Shanghai & Milan, was selected after a year-long research and selection process and announced yesterday by museum director and CEO, Thomas P. Campbell.

The job calls for the redesign of The Met's Southwest Wing for Modern and Contemporary Art, and — quite likely — also for adjacent exhibition spaces for the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas.

“We based the final selection of an architect on three criteria: vision, experience, and compatibility," Campbell remarked in his announcement. "David Chipperfield’s global architectural experience and sensibility, along with his commitment to the collaborative aspect of creating architecture, make him a perfect partner on this milestone project. His museum projects are brilliantly coherent, elegant, and accessible—from the Neues Museum in Berl...

The Met appoints Beatrice Galilee as Associate Curator of Architecture & Design

2014-03-03T21:17:00-05:00

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has appointed Beatrice Galilee as the Daniel Brodsky Associate Curator of Architecture and Design for the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, as announced by Museum Director and CEO Thomas P. Campbell.

Galilee's title is one of two new Museum curatorial positions endowed by and named after the Museum's Chairman, Daniel Brodsky, and his wife Estrellita B. Brodsky, an art historian and specialist in Latin American Art.

Galilee will begin work at the Museum this spring.

Here's more background info about Galilee: "Beatrice Galilee is a curator, writer, critic, and lecturer. Most recently, she was chief curator of the 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennale, Close, Closer, where she presented alternative realms of architectural and spatial practice. She was co-curator at the 2011 Gwangju Design Biennale, Design is Design is Not Design, in South Korea, and the 2009 Shenzhen Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, City Urbanizati...

Parsons and the Met team up to increase accessibility for disabled

2013-12-13T14:40:00-05:00

As virtual access to art collections expands through online walk-throughs and projects like Google’s Open Gallery, museums have long been experimenting within their own halls with ways to accommodate a wider range of visitors, particularly those with disabilities. Historically, museums have been leaders in the field of accessible institutional design, whether through improvised additions or new technology. In a collaboration between the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Parsons The New School for Design, students in the School of Art, Media, and Technology have focused on how both physical and online resources can optimize the museum experience for people with disabilities.

Working under the Design and Technology masters program and alongside education specialists at the Met, Parsons’ students spent the last semester designing a host of physical and digital tools to not only make museum resources more accessible, but to serve and benefit the public at large. Their work, including a...

Tomas Sarceno's Met Museum Rooftop Installation 'Cloud City' Now Open

2012-05-15T16:55:00-04:00

Yesterday's gray sky and drizzle couldn't keep anxious press away from the rooftop of the Metropolitan Museum of Art where Argentine artist and architect Tomas Saraceno was officially debuting his new project "Cloud City". A sculptural constellation of 16 geodesic pods, Cloud City "floats" above the museum's roof anchored by steel cables... The futuristic construction features over 100 planes...