Meet the female architect making history at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

By Jacqui Palumbo, CNN

(CNN) — Over the next five years, New York City will welcome two new momentous spaces for the arts, both along Manhattan’s iconic Fifth Avenue, some 40 blocks apart. The first is an airy new $550-million wing for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s modern and contemporary collection on the Upper East Side; the second is a new home for the groundbreaking National Black Theatre (NBT) in Harlem.

Both of these undertakings are led by the same architect, who, until now, had never completed a building for a cultural institution of this scale — nor had she even designed a major project in New York.

Frida Escobedo’s tandem commissions reflect the barrier-breaking superlatives she is now accruing. In a profession that often skews older and male, the 45-year-old Mexico City-born architect’s achievements have often been prefixed by “the youngest,” “the first” or a combination of the two. Her project with the Met, for instance, makes her the first female architect to design a wing in the storied museum’s 155-year history.

Escobedo has always forged her own path. Eschewing tradition, she opened her own eponymous studio in 2006 without having worked her way up through larger architectural firms or under the guidance of a celebrated “starchitect.” Her early projects included a juried commission for Mexico City’s Museo Experimental El Eco, where a series of movable concrete blocks in the museum’s courtyard can be built up or rearranged depending on the program, and the Plaza Cívica, a tilted round stage in the center of a busy plaza in Lisbon, for the Portuguese capital’s architectural triennial, that invited public interaction.

Escobedo’s breakout moment arrived in 2018, when she was selected to design that year’s Serpentine Pavilion, one of architecture’s most prestigious commissions, in London. There she constructed a dark, porous structure of stacked “celosia” walls, typical of Mexican buildings, that cast deep shadows with the rising and setting sun.

The architect’s practice is, she said, “changing constantly” as she works across scales and mediums — a series of Aesop retail stores, temporary sculptural museum installations or tranquil hospitality projects around Mexico. For Escobedo, architecture is a language through which she understands the world. With each new project, she refines her sense of minimalism with an elegant touch, often playing with form and materials that foster a sense of openness, tranquility and mutability.

“What I’ve learned is that I want to become very good at doing things for the first time. It’s about staying curious and engaged and not seeing it as something that you have complete knowledge of,” Escobedo said in a video call. “Even if you’re repeating a certain typology, see it with fresh eyes.”

Building for the future

At the Met, Escobedo took the unusual step of fully embedding herself by setting up an office in the museum and working there for a year as she collaborated closely with its staff. In 2030, when the Tang Wing for Modern and Contemporary Art is due to open, the five-floor building with two sweeping terraces and latticed facade, all of which face the greenery of Central Park, will give a sense of atmosphere and reverence to a portion of the museum that, architecturally, has always felt like an afterthought.

For David Breslin, the Met’s curator in charge for modern and contemporary art, Escobedo’s limited experience with large-scale buildings was not an issue. “People ask: ‘What’s it like working with an architect on their biggest project?’ And I say, ‘Well, it would probably be the biggest project for almost any architect that we chose,’” he said. “It just so happens that Frida is younger and earlier in her career than some others. But for whomever, this would have been the job.”

Breslin believes the museum has benefitted from working with an architect who is experimental and open, even without a CV full of similar projects.

“Artists love her, and artists are, a lot of the time, her first collaborators. I think she brings that same sense of real inquiry,” Breslin said. “I think the best artists are the ones who also refuse a signature style, who are open to having their minds changed. And I think she brings that artist’s mind, as well, to her idea of what design and architecture can be.

“We’re really building something for the future — and so we want to open up possibilities and not close them down,” he added.

Many parts of the Met have been in flux lately as the museum looks to the future, refreshing its galleries for European paintings; building a brand-new wing for African, Ancient American and Oceanic art; and providing a more central location for the blockbuster Costume Institute exhibitions that inspire the Met Gala each year. Escobedo’s task is to elevate and showcase the Met’s collection of 20th- and 21st-century art, which has long been underrepresented among the museum’s vast encyclopedic holdings and within its maze-like halls. The museum recently received a substantial gift of 188 artworks by leading surrealist and Dada figures, including Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Max Ernst, and has been adding contemporary additions from artists like Kerry James Marshall and Nicole Eisenman, Breslin said.

“We’re at the crossroads of many different collections,” Escobedo said of the new wing. “There’s this wonderful thing about the fluidity of the Met — you go from one wing to the other without even noticing it.” Visitors might wander from the Arms and Armor section to the American Wing, then find themselves gazing up at the Egyptian Temple of Dendur, letting serendipity guide them.

The Tang Wing, a collaboration with the architecture firm Beyer Blinder Belle, will also house rotating special exhibitions, requiring blank canvases of sorts. But Escobedo is rethinking what it means for a space to be versatile. “It’s common to think about flexibility as a very neutral space that could be reprogrammable, something that is flat and that could allow for different divisions of the space,” she explained. “But the way that we have been thinking is almost the opposite. It’s the architectural specificity that allows for future flexibility.”

She continued: “The collection holds many different formats — photography, prints, paintings, sculpture, video, installation — and because it’s a contemporary collection, it will be growing, and we don’t know what’s going to happen next. So the idea was that a variation of spaces, a range of scales, and different relations between them, would allow for a more interesting approach on what flexibility could be.”

A new monument

Two miles uptown from the Met, Escobedo approached her design for the building housing the National Black Theatre with the same sense of inquisitiveness. The NBT is one of the longest running Black theaters in the country, exploring and uplifting Black culture through a range of often genre-bending productions. Now relocating to Ray Harlem, a mixed-use residential building, the performing arts space was founded in 1968 by Dr. Barbara Ann Teer as a “temple for liberation” at a time when Harlem was largely abandoned, explained Teer’s daughter, Sade Lythcott, who now helms the NBT. Decades after the Harlem Renaissance, the artistic and cultural movement that transformed the city in the 1920s and 1930s, Teer remained committed to the neighborhood’s reinvestment and renewal.

“I told Frida that story, and how Frida responded was by far the most thoughtful, the most balanced and the most radical approach to what this hub of cultural ingenuity needed to be: a monument of Black imagination with a very refined and balanced hand,” Lythcott said in a video call. “She’s a deep listener. And I think architects build these massive structures and ego does get in the way — she just didn’t have any.”

Escobedo is collaborating with Marvel Architects, Handel Architects and interior design firm Little Wing Lee on the project, and recently completed the residential portion of the 21-story Ray Harlem. The NBT will open in its new permanent space in the tower’s lower floors in 2027, hosting both a 250-seat flexible “temple” and a 99-seat theater within its 27,000 square feet. A group of notable contemporary artists will contribute works to the space, too, including the interdisciplinary artist Sanford Biggers. In the spirit of serving its community, the new theater has been designed to forge a sense of inclusion, according to Lythcott.

“We wanted to be explicit about theater having to connect folks together, and — literally — our windows look into our neighbors windows,” Lythcott said, adding that the architecture promotes “this idea of belonging. No matter what view you have in the theater, you feel connected.”

Following her conversations with Lythcott, one point of reference Escobedo returned to was the residential stoop, where so many of Harlem’s residents spend their time with their families and neighbors. Stoops directly informed the theater’s private boxes, Lythcott said, but they also guided Escobedo’s thinking around how the space’s interiors could feel permeable to passersby.

“We wanted to make it visible, but, of course, it’s a theater, so there needs to be an enclosed space, as well as some opportunities to engage with the street,” Escobedo said. “There’s something really interesting in the streets of New York, particularly in Harlem, where some of the collective spaces happen just at the threshold of private and public.”

Escobedo said that when she began her career, she would have “never imagined” having two projects on the same historic avenue in Manhattan. Building her own practice, now with the support of two full studios in Mexico City and New York, has been “really difficult and incredibly challenging,” she said.

“I know that it might sound like it’s the opposite, because I had these opportunities when I was very young, but it’s hard. It’s hard to build trust around a practice that has not had previous experience,” she explained. “It’s a balance between being incredibly grateful for all these opportunities and being really surprised every time they happen.”

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