Peterson Rich Office Designed The Met’s New Condé M. Nast Galleries and its Inaugural Costume Institute Exhibition

Spanning 12,000 square feet through five sequential rooms, adapted from what was once an interior courtyard and later a gift shop, The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new Condé M. Nast Galleries debuted yesterday as the vessel for The Costume Institute’s current exhibition, “Costume Art.” Brooklyn–based architecture firm Peterson Rich Office (PRO), led by husband-and-wife principals Miriam Peterson and Nathan Rich, not only helmed the architectural framework of the galleries—including one named for Thom Browne, another for Michael Kors, and a third for Lance LePere—but also the design of the exhibition itself.

PRO—which, last year, deftly refreshed the landmarked 19th-century building that houses Soho’s MoMA Design Store—established a unified spatial language within a museum that’s an amalgamation of 21 previous expansions and renovations (and, in fact, the enclosing walls of the new galleries mask what were the exterior facades of historic Met buildings from the 1880s and 1890s). “We approached the Condé Nast Galleries with a deliberate paradox: the space needed to feel as enduring and integral as The Met itself, even as it serves content that rotates annually,” Rich tells Surface.

“The answer was in the architecture’s own history—grey marmorino plaster, massive oak doors in limestone arches, columns that read as permanent structure while concealing the technical infrastructure that makes flexibility possible,” Peterson adds. “The galleries don’t disguise their function; they elevate it.” It is through two 19-foot-tall limestone openings that guests enter. The ensuing plaster feels referential to The Met’s Greek and Roman galleries.

This aesthetic and ideological cohesion is mirrored by the exhibition itself, which sets 200 garments and accessories in direct dialogue with 200 artworks from The Met’s collection. When considered alongside Condé M. Nast Galleries’ more central location off the Great Hall, and the fact that it is three times the size of The Costume Institute’s previous home in The Met, the museum’s academic assertion that fashion is art stands affirmed. Further, the Head Curator of The Costume Institute, Andrew Bolton, expressed the desire for visitors to consider art in the context of the fashion pieces—not the other way around.