Designing Tomorrow’s Met: Kulapat Yantrasast

Nearly 50 years after the groundbreaking for the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, conceived to usher much of the world’s creative brilliance into an expanded Metropolitan campus, The Met is engaged in the execution of a plan to reimagine its galleries for the arts of sub-Saharan Africa, Oceania, and the ancient Americas. In 2019 the Museum began a complete renovation of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing in partnership with architect Kulapat Yantrasast, founder of WHY, who has dedicated his career and practice to cultural inclusivity. Learn from Yantrasast about his solution to the unique challenge of equitably articulating three separate but adjacent galleries united under a single wing of the Museum—the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—to develop aesthetically customized yet complementary galleries for each of these art histories, each with its own spatial qualities and relationship to light. His design reimagines and reintroduces these three major world traditions in dialogue with The Met collection as a whole.