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 that would be like a stitching-together.” Designer and curator addressed a large and largely sympathetic crowd, including the former’s collaborator on the project, landscape architect Thomas Woltz, as well as art-world publisher Lucas Zwirner and retired Met curator Morrison Heckscher, who recalled (with perhaps only a hint of a sigh) “coming in just when they hired [Kevin] Roche [John] Dinkeloo [and Associates].” The master planners’ late-1960s scheme, never fully realized, was notable for its expanses of raked glass; Escobedo’s warm, sandy-colored design seems almost like a rebuttal, though she was eager to fend off Breslin’s description of her solution as “elegant.” “ Simplicity, lightness—those are words I like,” Escobedo said. “God knows what elegance is.” Her only complaint about the existing institution? Its early closing time, which cut short her deep-cover research operation. “They said we could stay here till 5:00 p.m.,” she said. “We’re architects, we have to work later than that.”