Taking a Closer Look at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Fifth Avenue Facade
The art inside is not the only thing turning visitors’ heads
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the most distinguished art museums in the United States, attracting nearly seven million eager visitors each year. With over two million works of art in its collection, visitors are quick to appreciate the pieces inside the Museum, and overlook the significance of the impressive architecture of the Museum’s Fifth Avenue facade. However, a closer look at the Museum’s composition reveals the building to be a work of art in and of itself.
Even from afar, one is immediately struck by the monumentality of the Met’s exterior. Stretching from Eightieth to Eighty-Fourth Street, a four block limestone exterior outlines a building of tremendous scale and horizontality. Visitors walking along Fifth Avenue first come in contact with the expansive north/south wings of the building, designed by Charles Follen McKim in 1904.
The exterior of the stretched wings remain relatively unembellished. They feature a line of arched windows alternating with pilasters, establishing a steady flow that is aesthetically pleasing to the viewers’ eyes (see Figure 1). They are crowned by a cornice that is punctuated by bearded heads surmounted by torches and connecting swags.
Continuing alongside the wings, visitors are welcomed by the Met’s immense entry plaza. Scores of trees and benches for seating line the granite paving stones of the plaza providing visitors with a beautiful open civic space to socialize before entering the Museum. Additionally, the large fountains on each side greet passersby with magical water displays.
Once reaching the Museum’s Eighty-Second Street entrance, one is able to see the Museum’s facade in all of its glory (see Figure 2). The Museum is raised on a rusticated limestone base and approached by a grand, sprawling staircase designed by Kevin Roche in 1970, elevating the Museum and all its treasures off of the mundane ground. By virtue of the Museum’s bilateral symmetry, visitors’ eyes are immediately drawn up the steps and to the central entrance pavilion designed by architect Richard Morris Hunt in 1902.
As an alumni of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Hunt masterfully designed the central pavilion in the Beaux-Arts tradition with a classically inspired composition. Its defining feature — a colossal Roman arch with a tripartite window flanked by massive pairs of freestanding Corinthian columns — is repeated three times across the central block, generating a harmonious rhythm throughout the facade.
The massive columns are raised on high pedestals and each support their own entablatures. An extravagant cornice containing evenly spaced lion gargoyles across its top tier and dentils across the bottom, crowns the columns’ entablatures and runs along the entire width of the central block. Four blocks of uncarved limestone, originally meant to be sculptural groups representing the four great periods of art — Ancient, Classical, Renaissance, and Modern art — rest upon each of the entablatures (see Figure 3). They are set in front of an unornamented attic whose cornice is detailed by alternating heads of headdressed females connected by swags.
Tracing along the uppermost cornice, viewers catch sight of the shorter, slightly setback wings which flank the central pavilion and join with the McKim’s lengthy wings. Three classical aedicules, defined by triangular pediments, pilasters, and supporting scrolls, line the bottom halves of each of the wings. Above them, plain relief panels alternate with four caryatid figures representing the four principal arts: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, and Music (see Figure 4).
As visitors climb the grand staircase to enter the Museum, further sculptural elements bring the facade to life. Portrait medallions of six titans of art — Michelangelo, Bramante, Rembrandt, Raphael, Velázquez, and Dürer — adorn the spandrels of the arches, while their keystones depict the head of Athena. In each of the four intercolumniations, plain relief panels characterize the space above rounded niches, which remained empty until only recently.
In 2019, Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu filled these niches with four bronze sculptures of women seated on pedestals, individually titled The Seated I, II, III, and IV (see Figure 5). The inclusion of Mutu’s work was particularly revolutionary both because of the artist’s gender and ethnicity, and also because of the tension created by the juxtaposition between Mutu’s modern figures and the facade’s conservative Neoclassical design.
Composed by a handful of master architects, the sublime architecture of the Met is meant to leave its visitors in awe. The Museum’s Fifth Avenue facade and the intentions behind each aspect of its design is of critical importance to the Museum and New York City’s cultural significance. The Museum in and of itself is nothing short of a masterpiece. The next time you visit the Met, pause for a moment and admire the Museum in all its majesty. You certainly will not regret it.
