Met Breaks Ground on Frida Escobedo's $670M Tang Wing

The Metropolitan Museum of Art broke ground on Frida Escobedo's Tang Wing for modern and contemporary art, a five-story expansion expected to open in 2030.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art held a groundbreaking ceremony on Tuesday, September 15, 2026, for the Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Wing for Modern and Contemporary Art, kicking off the biggest project in what 6sqft calls a $1.5 billion transformation of the country's most visited museum. The five-story wing is designed by Mexico City-based architect Frida Escobedo, who outlets note is the first woman to design a wing at the museum in its 156-year history. At the ceremony, Escobedo said a groundbreaking in Spanish is called 'la primera piedra' — the first stone — and that it marks 'not a beginning, but a transformation.'

The wing is a genuine institutional first: as The Art Newspaper reported from the ceremony, Escobedo is the first woman to create a wing for the museum in its 156-year history, a fact speakers returned to repeatedly. The project also carries the largest cash gift in the museum's history — $125 million from financier Oscar Tang, a longtime Met trustee, and his wife, archaeologist and art historian Agnes Hsu-Tang, who The Art Newspaper notes said that, as immigrants, they were proud to be part of the Met's history. Escobedo called the Tang Wing 'the most ambitious project our studio has ever undertaken.'

According to 6sqft, the wing replaces the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing within the existing footprint on the museum's southwest corner, with a three-story base, a recessed fourth floor and a setback fifth floor inspired by Roche Dinkeloo's 1971 master plan. ArtDependence describes a facade defined by a limestone 'celosía' — an architectural screen drawing on Mexican, Arabic and North African traditions — whose stone lattice subtly responds to sunlight through the day. Per 6sqft, most of the facade is solid, with 10 percent clear glass and 10 percent celosia-style stone screen over glass. Gallery ceilings will range from 11 to 22 feet, ArtDependence reports.

A headline feature, according to 6sqft, is roughly 18,500 square feet of outdoor space across the fourth- and fifth-floor terraces, with views of Central Park and the Manhattan skyline accessible all year instead of just seasonally. The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden will move to an expanded 10,000-square-foot space on the fourth-floor terrace, and a 1,000-square-foot cafe will sit on the fifth floor, per ArtDependence. Met director Max Hollein said at the ceremony that 'for the first time, the Met will open up to the park, open up to its neighbours,' The Art Newspaper reports.

ArtDependence reports that at least a quarter of the galleries in the existing wing have southern or western exposures that make them unsuitable for long-term display and require significant energy to maintain temperature and humidity. The articulated facade and window placement of the new wing, along with a below-ground mechanical space, are intended to reduce solar gain while maximizing natural light. The wing will add two elevator cores, ramps, improved entry points and clear circulation, and Central Park Conservancy landscape work will bring accessible paths, new lighting, trees and perennial plantings around the building, according to ArtDependence.

The wing is expected to open in 2030, adding 69,500 square feet of exhibition space within a 126,000-square-foot building, a roughly 50 percent increase. It is part of a broader revamp that includes the reopened Rockefeller Wing (2025), a new Costume Institute gallery (2026), and galleries for ancient West Asia and Cyprus due in 2027, per 6sqft. Executive architect is Beyer Blinder Belle, with Kohler Ronan and Thornton Tomasetti engineering.