Why the Met brought a 200-foot-long window back to life in its renovated wing

Fast Company

2 days ago

After a years-long renovation, The Metropolitan Museum of Art has just reopened its 40,000-square-foot Michael C. Rockefeller Wing. At the heart of the project is a stunning feature that's gone largely unrecognized since the '80s.
The wing redesign was spearheaded by architect Kulapat Yantrasast and his team at the firm WHY architecture, whose clients include the Musée du Louvre, The Getty, and Harvard Libraries. The Met tasked WHY with fully reimagining a wing that contains three gallery collections focusing on the arts of Africa, the ancient Americas, and Oceania—around 1,800 total works of art.
The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing was originally built in 1982 and is home to an architectural feature that's a piece of art in itself: an approximately 200-foot-long, 80-foot-tall sloped glass wall with expansive views into Central Park. But for more than 20 years, the shades on the wall have been drawn to protect artwork from light damage, leaving the space shrouded in darkness.
Through WHY's redesign, the glass wall has been uncovered and the three collections have a brand new layout, showcasing the building's beauty and flooding its galleries with natural light.
'No architect today would put a giant glass facade on the south side of a museum'
According to Brian Butterfield, design director at WHY, the gigantic sloped glass wall is especially striking because it's a feature that 'no architect today' would ever put on the south side of a museum.
When dealing with valuable artwork, anything that's rendered with pigment, made of wood, or fashioned from another delicate material can be photosensitive, meaning sun exposure can lead to damage over time. What's worse, the former layout of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing placed wooden and pigmented works from the Oceania collection close to the glass wall, making it potentially even more hazardous to raise the wall's shades.
Still, when WHY took on the project, nearly everyone involved ultimately agreed that the glass wall was an essential part of the space.
'The Met sits in Central Park, and the Landmarks Preservation Commission as well as the Central Park Conservancy were in agreement that the sloped glass wall should be replaced, if not directly in kind, then in a way that didn't change the architectural expression too much,' Butterfield says.
Pulling back the shades
Alongside the design and engineering firm Arup Group, WHY set about experimenting with ways to not only preserve the wall, but also make it a truly functional feature of the wing. One advantage that today's designers have over those of the '80s, Butterfield says, is advances in glass technology.
'The glass of 40 years ago is not the glass of today,' Butterfield says. 'Today, you can have double or triple glazing, and you can have inner layers with different films and frits and gas fills, all of which protect art by reducing visible daylight, eliminating all infrared light, and eliminating all ultraviolet light.'
Glazing, films, frits (a kind of glass powder), and gas fills are all various ways to alter the properties of glass to give a more filtering effect—and all of them have been employed on the new custom sloped wall. To maximize the space's natural light while keeping its artwork safe, the wall is now formatted in a gradient that's not apparent to the naked eye.
At floor level, where no art is displayed, the glass is fully translucent. As the panels move upward, though, they become increasingly filtered to block any harsh rays. The wall is designed to keep the window fully exposed throughout the day; shades only deploy if light levels exceed a safe maximum.
'Instead of them just being 100% down for the last 20 years, maybe they'll only be deployed 20% of the time throughout the calendar year, so that the majority of time visitors are in the gallery, they can experience that connection to Central Park,' Butterfield says.
To further safeguard the wing's art, the WHY team reconfigured its layout so that light-sensitive works, like those in the Oceania collection, are arranged in carefully placed alcoves hidden from the sun, while hardier metal and stone pieces are closer to the glass wall. This shift is just one of several changes that the designers made to transform the gallery space from a cramped, easy-to-miss area of the Met into a bright, well-paced wing that would encourage viewers to slow down and appreciate its works.
From drab to 'airy and light'
The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing's three galleries include the Arts of Africa, which surveys visual traditions across sub-Saharan Africa; the Arts of Oceania, which includes monumental works from New Guinea and surrounding island archipelagoes; and the Arts of the Ancient Americas, which focuses on arts of Latin American prior to American invasions after 1492. The rightful ownership of some works in the wing, including several Indigenous works donated to the American gallery, remains a subject of debate.
Several elements of the wing's former design were due for an update. In its previous configuration, the three galleries were arranged in distinct parallel bars, making each feel separate from the others. Walkways that cut directly through the African and Oceanic spaces allowed viewers to walk straight through the wing without taking a closer look at its work. Combined with the relative lack of natural light from the shaded glass wall, Butterfield says there was a bit of a 'dated '80s feel' to some of the galleries.
'It felt dark, it felt drab,' Butterfield says. 'The African galleries were designated in yellows and browns, the Oceania galleries were in blues—it felt very reductive in its presentation.'
To address those concerns, WHY completely shifted the flow of the space. Now, a central walkway moves diagonally through the wing, taking viewers on a path that brings them in close contact with each of the three gallery spaces. The walkway itself is the Oceanic collection, imagined as a kind of connective 'ocean' between the adjacent Africa and the Ancient Americas collections. Each of the three sections has a toned-down color story, with warm white and plaster accents in the African collection, limestone in the Americas, and frosted glass in the Oceanic area.
'It was both a poetic move to have the diagonal cut through, to separate the three galleries, but to also allow for meaningful overlap and cross-cultural dialogue between them,' Butterfield says. 'There's a lot of visual transparency between the three collections, but the diagonal allows us to really control the actual pedestrian connections between the three collections.'
Overhead, a series of arched baffles give the wing a striking vault shape. Everywhere viewers look, there's a sightline into Central Park. Butterfield says the details, taken together, give an 'airy, light, contemporary feel.'
'We were doing everything we could to really push forward the practice of lighting in a museum, so these objects really sing,' Butterfield says.