A Stitch in Lime

To shuffle into the Metropolitan Museum of Art after closing, under the darkened domes of the Great Hall and past the mastaba, en route to the auditorium, is to feel for a moment that one is finally living the childhood dream, staging a sleepover amid the masterworks. For Frida Escobedo, that dream became more or less real: The architect of the Met’s planned Tang Wing for Modern and Contemporary Art, who greeted audiences for an after-hours talk late last month, embedded herself in the sprawling structure for months in order to work up her proposal. The experience—“Like going from dating to getting married,” remarked moderator and contemporary and modern art curator David Breslin—appears to have emboldened Escobedo, who leveraged her intimacy with the museum to imagine a hanging gardens–like addition jutting off the southwest corner of the Upper East Side complex. She insisted that the intervention, notable for its size and articulated limestone façade, was in fact rather modest: “You could have done something very Haussmannian,” she said. “I wanted to do something t…