Brooklyn-based architecture firm Peterson Rich Office will create a new special exhibition gallery and re-envision The Met’s dining and retail spaces, along with its street-level entrance at 83rd Street and Fifth Avenue
(New York, November 28, 2023)—The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced today the selection of emerging Brooklyn-based architecture firm Peterson Rich Office (PRO) to design a new special exhibition gallery and reimagine the Museum’s dining and retails spaces, along with its street-level entrance at 83rd Street and Fifth Avenue. Beyer, Blinder, Belle Architects LLP have joined as the project’s executive architect.
Currently still in its planning phases, the project is a major institutional initiative that will comprise several components, including the conversion of the current Met Store (adjacent to the Great Hall) into a new 11,500-square-foot gallery that will display The Costume Institute’s annual spring show, and, at times, other shows from other curatorial departments. The project will also encompass the activation of the Museum’s entrance at 83rd Street and Fifth Avenue to allow for easier public access into the Museum, and the reconfiguration of the spaces within The Met for dining, retail, and The Met Store.
Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and CEO, said: “We’re thrilled to partner with Peterson Rich Office on this complex and transformative project, which will allow us to present more art and exhibitions and to better meet the needs of Met visitors, especially in a space so central to the museum. The ways in which visitors and local communities interact with cultural institutions have changed dramatically over the past few years, and this project presents an opportunity for us to invest even more in the visitor experience and create new ways for all communities to enjoy the Museum—both during and outside our regular hours.”
“Miriam Peterson and Nathan Rich join a long list of meaningful architectural commissions at The Met, including most recently Frida Escobedo, Nader Tehrani, and Kulapat Yantrasast," said Jhaelen Hernandez-Eli, Vice President of Capital Projects. "Peterson Rich, with Beyer Blinder Belle, will help us realize an immensely complicated project adjacent to the Great Hall and the Fifth Avenue Plaza. The Special Exhibitions Gallery and 83rdStreet Entrance are extensions of these beloved public spaces, enabling a more accessible and immersive threshold between the City and the Museum.”
Miriam Peterson and Nathan Rich, Co-Founders of Peterson Rich Office, said: "We are honored to be a part of a long lineage of architects working within such an iconic New York, and uniquely American, institution. It is with a sense of great responsibility that we undertake this project, which will be transformative for the museum’s public realm, the Costume Institute, and The Met’s special exhibition spaces."
About Peterson Rich Office
Peterson Rich Office (PRO) is a Brooklyn-based architecture and design practice recognized for cultural and publicly engaged projects at multiple scales. Since establishing their firm in 2014, principals Miriam Peterson and Nathan Rich have led a diverse team in realizing projects for leading clients in the cultural, residential, retail, and public sectors.
The firm has developed a significant body of work around adaptive reuse, especially with projects that introduce new elements into structures of historic significance. Through this work, PRO has developed an architectural vocabulary that embraces context, and finds richness in it as a point of departure for creating something new, rather than something to be smoothed over or erased entirely.
2024 will see the completion of multiple PRO projects, including The Shepherd Gallery & Arts Center in Detroit, the new Davison Art Gallery at Wesleyan University, and an artist studio for Nina Chanel Abney. Through an ongoing multi-year partnership with NYCHA (NYC Housing Authority) PRO creates and conducts inclusive community design exercises that provide critical insights and recommendations aimed at helping to improve the country’s largest public housing system and is currently working to shepherd design excellence for NYCHA renovations across all five boroughs.
About the Project
The initiative will take several years and is divided broadly into two phases: construction of the new exhibition gallery on the first floor, followed by the renovation of the Plaza entrance and reconfiguring of dining and retail spaces on the lower level. The new gallery is scheduled to be completed by 2026, with the remaining components to follow. Dining and Retail areas may be impacted or relocated during the project, however no job layoffs are expected in this department.
Fundraising for this project is already in progress, with Met Trustee Anna Wintour taking a leadership role in helping the Museum secure support for this initiative. The budget is still in development and is expected to require not one but multiple generous gifts.
Additional details about the project will be shared in the coming months.
About The Costume Institute
The Costume Institute's collection comprises over 33,000 objects representing seven centuries of fashionable dress and accessories for men, women, and children, from the 15th century to the present. It began as the Museum of Costume Art, an independent entity formed in 1937. In 1946, it merged with The Metropolitan Museum of Art as The Costume Institute and became a curatorial department in 1959. In January 2009, the Brooklyn Museum transferred its renowned costume collection to The Met, where it is known as the Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The combined collections now constitute the largest and most comprehensive costume collection in the world. In May 2014, The Costume Institute reopened as the Anna Wintour Costume Center, comprising the Lizzie and Jonathan Tisch Gallery and the Carl and Iris Barrel Apfel Gallery, a state-of-the-art costume conservation laboratory, a study/storage facility, and The Irene Lewisohn Costume Reference Library, one of the world's foremost fashion libraries.
The department has presented some of The Met’s most visited exhibitions, including Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty (2011), China: Through the Looking Glass (2015), and Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination (2018). This December, the department’s fall 2023 exhibition, Women Dressing Women, will celebrate the creativity and artistic legacy of women designers whose fashions are represented in the Museum’s permanent collection.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has announced The Costume Institute’s spring 2024 exhibition, Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion. Presented at The Met Fifth Avenue from May 10 through September 2, 2024, the exhibition will feature original research, conservation analysis, and diverse technologies to revive and explore the sensory capacities of masterworks in the Museum’s collection. Using the natural world as a uniting visual metaphor for the transience of fashion, the show will explore cyclical themes of rebirth and renewal, breathing new life into these storied objects through creative and immersive activations designed to convey the smells, sounds, textures, and motions of garments that can no longer directly interact with the body.
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November 28, 2023
Contact:
Communications@metmuseum.org
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