Frida Escobedo Will Design The New Modern & Contemporary Art Wing
At just 42 years of age, Escobedo was thought of as one of the younger candidates and will be the youngest to add work to The Met.
Mexican architect Frida Escobedo has been chosen to design a $500 million expansion of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The new addition will be the Modern and Contemporary Art Wing. At age 38 in 2018, Escobedo designed the Serpentine Pavillion at the Serpentine Gallery in London’s Hyde Park. “It’s a very important commission,” said the museum’s director, Max Hollein. “This collection will continue to grow more significantly than any other area.” “She is a strong voice in the architectural discourse,” said Hollein of Escobedo.
“She produces very contemporary buildings that are rooted in a modern canon.”
At 42 and without many permanent structures on her resume, Escobedo was a slightly surprising choice for such a large and prestigious project. She previously designed the Lisbon Architecture Triennale and the Chicago Architecture Biennial, both temporary structures. But Daniel H. Weiss, the museum’s president and chief executive, stated that Escobedo was the best option to complete the new wing saying that she would deliver “a signature building that speaks to the art of our time” and that he expected the project to be completed in about seven years.
Frida Escobedo was born in 1979 in Mexico City and studied at the Universidad Iberoamericana. After her studies in Mexico City, she moved on to complete her master’s degree in Art and the Public Domain at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Escobedo has taught at Columbia, Harvard, and Rice, and currently teaches at Yale. In Mexico some of her notable work includes the expansion of La Tallera Siqueiros in Cuernavaca, Mexico, a museum, workshop, and artists’ residence that was the home and studio of the muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. She also designed and completed the renovations to the Hotel Boca Chica in 2008.
