Work begins on the Met’s Central Park-facing wing for modern art, due in 2030

Construction has officially started on a five-story wing for modern and contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Upper East Side museum marked the start with a groundbreaking ceremony on Tuesday, Sept. 15, and it plans to open the wing in 2030.

The country’s most visited museum is in the middle of a $1.5 billion overhaul, and this addition is the biggest single project in it. The building will be named the Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Wing, and its design comes from the studio of Mexico City architect Frida Escobedo. Once finished, it will give the museum 50 percent more gallery space, new outdoor areas overlooking Central Park and smoother connections to the rest of the museum. The commission also makes history: in the Met’s 156 years, no woman before Escobedo had been chosen to design one of its wings.

Where the Met’s new wing goes and what it looks like

The new wing will take the place of the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing in the southwest corner and will not extend past the museum’s existing footprint. Three stories form the base. Above it, the fourth level is pulled inward and the fifth steps back again, a shape that follows Roche Dinkeloo’s 1971 master plan.

On the outside, a limestone lattice takes its cue from the celosía, a screen used in Mexican architecture that grew out of Arabic and North African traditions. The stone shifts with the sun through the day and frames views of the park while keeping the galleries from getting too much light. Solid wall covers most of the facade. Clear glass accounts for 10 percent, and glass set behind the stone screen accounts for another 10 percent.

A bigger Met roof garden, open all year

Terraces on levels four and five will provide 18,500 square feet of outdoor space. The fourth-level terrace becomes the new home of the Cantor Roof Garden, which grows from 7,500 square feet to 10,000. Up on the fifth level, visitors will find a new cafe. The old rooftop welcomed guests only part of the year, but the new terraces will offer park and skyline views in every season.

Beyer Blinder Belle is serving as executive architect, with landscape design by Nelson Byrd Woltz and engineering by Kohler Ronan and Thornton Tomasetti. Speaking at the ceremony, Escobedo explained that in Spanish a groundbreaking is called “la primera piedra,” meaning the first stone. She called it “not a beginning, but a transformation.”

Other recent updates at the Met include the renovated Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, which opened in 2025 with 40,000 square feet of art from Oceania, the ancient Americas and sub-Saharan Africa.