THE GREAT HALL OVERHAUL

Buildings tell stories. They last a long time and embody history in ways that are resistant to political manipulation. In an age when our mental faculties are increasingly outsourced to algorithms that tell us what we want to hear, buildings offer something harder: meaning that accumulates slowly, through direct encounter.

When contemporary interventions occupy historic buildings, they create a unique temporal experience. Visitors can simultaneously inhabit different historical moments — what philosopher Walter Benjamin called “dialectical images,” where past and present illuminate each other. These spaces foster a more complex relationship with history itself. Rather than treating the past as something complete and separate — or as mere dataset to be mined — this architecture suggests history is something we actively engage with, reinterpret, and continue. Time becomes layered and concurrent. This encourages a dynamic and participatory relationship with cultural heritage and acknowledges that architecture is living culture, not static artifact.

ACCUMULATION AND COHERENCE

The Metropolitan Museum of Art embodies these principles at institutional scale. Twenty-one different expansions and renovations have created a rich collage of construction types, materials, and design philosophies — a living testament to architectural accumulation. Despite this heterogeneous composition, the museum maintains its coherence through a masterful orchestration of enfilades: long sightlines that form interior urban corridors, connecting disparate spaces and diverse art collections into a unified spatial experience.

Our design for the new Great Hall Gallery under my practice Peterson Rich Office with founding partner Miriam Peterson builds upon this organizing principle. The gallery occupies 12,000 square feet across five sequential rooms within a former exterior courtyard immediately adjacent to the landmark Great Hall. The enclosing walls conceal what were previously the exterior façades of historic Met buildings from the 1880s and 1890s. This unique condition creates an extraordinary opportunity to expose and celebrate layers of the museum’s architectural history while establishing a new gallery environment. The space is designed to accommodate diverse rotating exhibitions, in particular The Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute annual spring show — one of the museum’s most popular and culturally significant presentations.

We approached the project with a deliberate paradox: the gallery should feel as enduring and integral as the building itself, even as it serves content that will rotate annually. This is temporal layering made architectural — a space that embodies both permanence and flux.

A JOURNEY THROUGH TIME

The spatial sequence begins with the Orientation Gallery, positioned at the corner of Richard Morris Hunt’s original Great Hall building, and concludes with the Finale Gallery, which faces Arthur Lyman Tuckerman’s third Met building from 1894 and Calvert Vaux’s first Met building from 1880. By bracketing the new gallery between these pivotal structures from the museum’s founding era, the design creates a powerful dialogue spanning the Met’s earliest and most recent architectural chapters.

Visitors enter the Orientation Gallery through two 19-foot-tall limestone openings, immediately encountering new gallery walls clad in grey marmorino plaster — a traditional Italian technique that lends the surfaces a timelessness reminiscent of the Met’s Greek and Roman galleries. This space serves as both spatial and aesthetic transition from the historic Great Hall to the contemporary gallery beyond. Embedded in the north and south walls, two permanent pieces of glass casework provide windows into the new gallery from surrounding parts of the museum, holding key objects and didactic text that introduce the exhibition while communicating its presence to passersby. An ornate limestone arch, preserved from Richard Morris Hunt’s design, surrounds one of the cases, creating a moment of contrast between old and new. Two massive 8-by-16-foot swinging oak doors — which can be closed or held open depending on programming — serve as a threshold between the Orientation Gallery and the primary exhibition spaces beyond.

Here, the juxtaposition is explicit: historic limestone frames contemporary glass, traditional archways meet modern casework, century-old masonry walls support twenty-first-century exhibition infrastructure. These are the dialectical images Benjamin described — each element rendering the other more legible through contrast.

LIGHT AND STRUCTURE

The second room, the High Gallery, serves as one of two primary exhibition spaces. Referencing its 21-foot ceilings, this expansive, flexible space occupies the former exterior courtyard and is outfitted to support a wide range of exhibitions. An innovative lighting strategy defines the character of this room: a series of structural beams along the ceiling carries the gallery’s technical infrastructure while simultaneously uplighting an upper ceiling plane, creating an ambient, even light source that softly evokes the space’s original function as an open exterior courtyard. This carefully calibrated system provides the flexible, high-quality illumination essential for rotating exhibitions, while the heavy beams and columns create a sense of permanence and distinct architectural identity.

Four openings connect the High Gallery to the adjacent Low Gallery, the second primary exhibition space. This 4,750-square-foot room is designed for more intimate presentations. Lower ceilings allow for floor-to-ceiling casework and displays of smaller works, creating a different scale of gallery experience that maintains a porous visual relationship to the adjacent High Gallery.

REVEALING HISTORY

The sequence concludes in the Finale Gallery, where an exposed wall of historic brick and granite masonry — remnants of the museum’s original 1880s and 1890s buildings — stands in deliberate contrast to the contemporary plaster surfaces that define the main gallery spaces. This architectural revelation serves as a poignant symbol for the gallery’s central tension: the coexistence of historic permanence and constant transformation. Here too, plaster walls and 21-foot ceilings are outfitted with lighting infrastructure to support contemporary exhibitions, but the exposed historic fabric anchors the space in the museum’s founding era.

Through this juxtaposition, visitors experience a tangible dialogue between the museum’s architectural past and its evolving present. The historic wall is not presented as artifact — something precious and untouchable — but as active participant in the contemporary gallery experience. Art hangs against contemporary plaster mere feet from 140-year-old brick. Visitors circulate through twenty-first-century space while surrounded by nineteenth-century fabric. Time becomes layered and concurrent rather than linear and separate.

A small shop space dedicated to supporting special exhibitions sits adjacent to the Finale Gallery. From here, a new set of wood doors — matching those at the Orientation Gallery — transitions visitors directly into the museum’s Medieval galleries, drawing audiences deeper into the Met’s collections through a newly scripted sequence of movements and spaces.

LIVING CULTURE

The Great Hall Gallery demonstrates that adaptive reuse is not about choosing between old and new, but about creating productive dialogue between them. The gallery deliberately exposes historic building components while creating exhibition spaces of clearly contemporary character between them, establishing a visual language of layered time that honors the museum’s past while serving its future.

Most significantly, by relocating the Costume Institute’s marquee annual exhibition to the front of the museum, immediately adjacent to the Great Hall and steps from the Fifth Avenue entrance, the project fundamentally repositions fashion and costume art within the Met’s spatial hierarchy. What was once displayed in lower-level galleries now occupies a prominent position alongside the institution’s foundational collections, affirming costume art’s status as central to the museum’s mission rather than peripheral to it.

This repositioning carries the democratizing impulse described at the outset. Fashion and costume, historically marginalized within fine art hierarchies, now stand alongside Egyptian antiquities, Greek sculpture, and Medieval masterworks. The architectural gesture argues that all forms of creative expression — past and present, fine and applied, revered and newly recognized — deserve to occupy the same cultural space.

Year after year, as exhibitions rotate and evolve, the gallery itself will remain unmistakably at The Met and of The Met — neither purely historic nor entirely contemporary, but rather a space that embodies both. This is architecture as living culture: dynamic, participatory, resistant to becoming static artifact. The building continues its story, inviting each generation to add new chapters while remaining legible as a coherent whole.