Tang Wing for Modern and Contemporary Art — Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Met is demolishing a wing and building a new one inside its own footprint, which is a harder job than it sounds on a landmarked Fifth Avenue campus that stays open throughout.

The Tang Wing replaces the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing at the museum’s southwest corner near 81st Street. Frida Escobedo Studio is the design architect — the first woman to design a wing in the Met’s 154-year history — with Beyer Blinder Belle as executive architect. Thornton Tomasetti has structural, Kohler Ronan has MEP and Nelson Byrd Woltz has landscape. Construction is set to start this summer, finishing in 2030.

Project Scope

The new wing runs about 126,000 square feet across five levels: a three-story base with recessed fourth and fifth floors. It increases the Met’s gallery space for modern and contemporary art by close to 50 percent. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission has approved the design.

The $550 million budget is privately funded, anchored by a $125 million gift from Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang. The museum projects roughly 4,000 union construction jobs over the build, with a 30 to 40 percent MWBE participation target. No general contractor has been named publicly.

Why It Matters

Demolition and reconstruction inside an operating museum is a logistics exercise with a very short list of acceptable failures. Vibration monitoring, dust control and load path management have to protect collections in adjacent galleries that stay open to the public. The staging footprint on a Fifth Avenue site bounded by Central Park is close to nonexistent, which pushes toward prefabrication and tightly scheduled deliveries.

There’s also a market read here. Cultural construction has been quiet since 2023, with several major museum projects deferred on cost. A $550 million wing that cleared Landmarks and has $125 million of its funding already committed is a real signal that the philanthropic pipeline for institutional work in New York is open again. Firms chasing that market should watch who the Met picks as GC.

Project Team & Details