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After a years-long renovation, The Metropolitan Museum of Art has just reopened its 40,000-square-foot Michael C. Rockefeller Wing. At the heart of the project is a stunning feature thats gone largely unrecognized since the 80s. The wing redesign was spearheaded by architect Kulapat Yantrasast and his team at the firm WHY architecture, whose clients include the Musée du Louvre, The Getty, and Harvard Libraries. The Met tasked WHY with fully reimagining a wing that contains three gallery collections focusing on the arts of Africa, the ancient Americas, and Oceaniaaround 1,800 total works of art. The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing was originally built in 1982 and is home to an architectural feature thats a piece of art in itself: an approximately 200-foot-long, 80-foot-tall sloped glass wall with expansive views into Central Park. But for more than 20 years, the shades on the wall have been drawn to protect artwork from light damage, leaving the space shrouded in darkness. Through WHYs redesign, the glass wall has been uncovered and the three collections have a brand new layout, showcasing the buildings beauty and flooding its galleries with natural light. [Photo: Bridgit Beyer/courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art] ‘No architect today would put a giant glass facade on the south side of a museum’ According to Brian Butterfield, design director at WHY, the gigantic sloped glass wall is especially striking because its a feature that no architect today would ever put on the south side of a museum. When dealing with valuable artwork, anything thats rendered with pigment, made of wood, or fashioned from another delicate material can be photosensitive, meaning sun exposure can lead to damage over time. Whats worse, the former layout of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing placed wooden and pigmented works from the Oceania collection close to the glass wall, making it potentially even more hazardous to raise the walls shades. Still, when WHY took on the project, nearly everyone involved ultimately agreed that the glass wall was an essential part of the space. The Met sits in Central Park, and the Landmarks Preservation Commission as well as the Central Park Conservancy were in agreement that the sloped glass wall should be replaced, if not directly in kind, then in a way that didn’t change the architectural expression too much, Butterfield says. [Photo: Bridgit Beyer/courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art] Pulling back the shades Alongside the design and engineering firm Arup Group, WHY set about experimenting with ways to not only preserve the wall, but also make it a truly functional feature of the wing. One advantage that todays designers have over those of the 80s, Butterfield says, is advances in glass technology. The glass of 40 years ago is not the glass of today, Butterfield says. Today, you can have double or triple glazing, and you can have inner layers with different films and frits and gas fills, all of which protect art by reducing visible daylight, eliminating all infrared light, and eliminating all ultraviolet light. Glazing, films, frits (a kind of glass powder), and gas fills are all various ways to alter the properties of glass to give a more filtering effectand all of them have been employed on the new custom sloped wall. To maximize the spaces natural light while keeping its artwork safe, the wall is now formatted in a gradient thats not apparent to the naked eye. At floor level, where no art is displayed, the glass is fully translucent. As the panels move upward, though, they become increasingly filtered to block any harsh rays. The wall is designed to keep the window fully exposed throughout the day; shades only deploy if light levels exceed a safe maximum. [Photo: Bridgit Beyer/courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art] Instead of them just being 100% down for the last 20 years, maybe they’ll only be deployed 20% of the time throughout the calendar year, so that the majority of time visitors are in the gallery, they can experience that connection to Central Park, Butterfield says. To further safeguard the wings art, the WHY team reconfigured its layout so that light-sensitive works, like those in the Oceania collection, are arranged in carefully placed alcoves hidden from the sun, while hardier metal and stone pieces are closer to the glass wall. This shift is just one of several changes that the designers made to transform the gallery space from a cramped, easy-to-miss area of the Met into a bright, well-paced wing that would encourage viewers to slow down and appreciate its works. [Photo: Bridgit Beyer/courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art] From drab to ‘airy and light’ The Michael C. Rockefeller Wings three galleries include the Arts of Africa, which surveys visual traditions across sub-Saharan Africa; the Arts of Oceania, which includes monumental works from New Guinea and surrounding island archipelagoes; and the Arts of the Ancient Americas, which focuses on arts of Latin American prior to American invasions after 1492. The rightful ownership of some works in the wing, including several Indigenous works donated to the American gallery, remains a subject of debate. Several elements of the wings former design were due for an update. In its previous configuration, the three galleries were arranged in distinct parallel bars, making each feel separate from the others. Walkways that cut directly through the African and Oceanic spaces allowed viewers to walk straight through the wing without taking a closer look at its work. Combined with the relative lack of natural light from the shaded glass wall, Butterfield says there was a bit of a dated 80s feel to some of the galleries. It felt dark, it felt drab, Butterfield says. The African galleries were designated in yellows and browns, the Oceania galleries were in bluesit felt very reductive in its presentation. To address those concerns, WHY completely shifted the flow of the space. Now, a central walkway moves diagonally through the wing, taking viewers on a path that brings them in close contact with each of the three gallery spaces. The walkway itself is the Oceanic collection, imagined as a kind of connective ocean between the adjacent Africa and the Ancient Americas collections. Each of the three sections has a toned-down color story, with warm white and plaster accents in the African collection, limestone in the Americas, and frosted glass in the Oceanic area. It was both a poetic move to have the diagonal cut through, to separate the three galleries, but to also allow for meaningful overlap and cross-cultural dialogue between them, Butterfield says. There’s a lot of visual transparency between the three collections, but the diagonal allows us to really control the actual pedestrian connections between the three collections. Overhead, a series of arched baffles give the wing a striking vault shape. Everywhere viewers look, theres a sightline into Central Park. Butterfield says the details, taken together, give an airy, light, contemporary feel. We were doing everything we could to really push forward the practice of lighting in a museum, so these objects really sing, Butterfield says.
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Honolulu’s coastal Ala Moana Boulevard is a critical road in the Hawaiian capital, but it’s also a major hindrance. With six lanes of fast-moving traffic and few easily accessible crossing points, it’s effectively a hurdle between the city and its main public space, Ala Moana Park, and the broad beach there. Now, a stunning new pedestrian bridge has opened to make it easier to cross that rushing road. Winding its way from the edge of downtown Honolulu over the highway to a boat harbor and the corner of Ala Moana Park, the pedestrian bridge is an elegant piece of urban infrastructure, accented by artwork and connected to a series of paths cutting through a lush tropical landscape. It’s part of Victoria Ward Park, a two-phase publicly accessible open space connected to Ward Village, the 60-acre mixed use development that aims to redefine the urban realm in this part of the city. Developed by Howard Hughes, Ward Village is a blank slate development on former warehouse land that will add, over the course of decades, more than 5,000 units of housing, nearly 1 million square feet of retail, and more than three acres of public greenspace. Several condo buildings are fully occupied and many future condos are already pre-sold, representing more than $6 billion in revenue, according to Howard Hughes’ 2024 annual report. Beyond its Honolulu project, the company made more than $1.75 billion in revenue in 2024, according to Pitchbook. [Photo: courtesy Ward Village] Building a bridge to downtown Greenspace, primarily in the form of Victoria Ward Park, is a key part of the company’s strategy for luring residents and businesses, and turning Ward Village into a new model for urban development in Honolulu. “A goal for Ward Village is to make the overall neighborhood significantly more walkable, comfortable, and safe,” says Doug Johnstone, president of the Hawaii region for Howard Hughes. Born and raised in Honolulu, Johnstone says that while the city is full of world-class amenities, its urban realm can sometimes be lacking. “It’s inherently a little disjointed and difficult to get around,” Johnstone says. [Photo: courtesy Ward Village] That’s why the Ward Village developmentestimated to cost several billion dollars over a planned implementation period that runs through the 2030sset aside the space for the park, and spent a considerable amount of time coordinating with state and local officials to get the pedestrian bridge built. Costing a total of $17.8 million, the bridge is technically a project of the state’s Department of Transportation. It was mostly funded by a federal grant, and Howard Hughes helped pay for the 20% portion of the budget required from local sources, donating land, funding the bridge design and providing environmental documentation. “There’s a lot of folks wearing different hats that are trying to see it through, and making sure also it’s done well aesthetically and experience-wise,” Johnstone says. “It’s complementary to what we’re doing in Ward Village, but also something Honolulu can be proud of.” [Photo: courtesy Ward Village] Ocean-to-inland Making the bridge possible is the existence of Victoria Ward Park, which was designed by Vita Planning and Landscape Architecture. The first phase of the park covers 1.4 acres from the edge of Ala Moana Boulevard inland, and is now open. The second phase, covering roughly 2 acres higher inland and more nestled in the Ward Village development, will finish construction later this year. This ocean-to-inland connection became a guiding concept for the Honolulu park’s design, according to Don Vita, founder of Vita Planning and Landscape Architecture. “Going back and forth from the ocean up to the mountains is a very important cultural orientation in Hawaii and that’s exactly what we did with the configuration and the location of the park,” he says.
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In the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, Justin Bibb was living in a tight, one-bedroom apartment in Cleveland, Ohio. He couldnt open his windows because his home was an old office building converted to residential unitsnot exactly conducive to physical and mental well-being in the middle of a global crisis. So he sought refuge elsewhere: a large green space, down near the lakefront, where he could stroll. Unfortunately, Bibb said, thats not the case for many of our residents in the city of Cleveland. A native of Cleveland, Bibb was elected the 58th mayor of the city in 2021. Immediately after taking office, he took inspiration from the 15-minute city concept of urban design, an idea that envisions people reaching their daily necessitieswork, grocery stores, pharmacieswithin 15 minutes by walking, biking, or taking public transit. That reduces dependence on cars, and also slashes carbon emissions and air pollution. In Cleveland, Bibbs goal is to put all residents within a 10-minute walk of a green space by the year 2045, by converting abandoned lots to parks and other efforts. Cleveland is far from alone in its quest to adapt to a warming climate. As American cities have grown in size and population and gotten hotter, theynot the federal governmenthave become crucibles for climate action: Cities are electrifying their public transportation, forcing builders to make structures more energy efficient, and encouraging rooftop solar. Together with ambitious state governments, hundreds of cities large and small are pursuing climate action plansdocuments that lay out how they will reduce emissions and adapt to extreme weatherwith or without support from the feds. Clevelands plan, for instance, calls for all its commercial and residential buildings to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. For local leaders, climate action has grown all the more urgent since the Trump administration has been boosting fossil fuels and threatening to sue states to roll back environmental regulations. Last month, Republicans in the House passed a budget bill that would end nearly all the clean energy tax credits from the Biden administrations signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act. Because Donald Trump is in the White House again, its going to be up to mayors and governors to really enact and sustain the momentum around addressing climate change at the local level, said Bibb, who formerly chaired Climate Mayors, a bipartisan group of nearly 350 mayors. City leaders can move much faster than federal agencies, and are more in-tune with what their people actually want, experts said. Theyre on the ground and theyre hearing from their residents every day, so they have a really good sense of what the priorities are, said Kate Johnson, regional director for North America at C40 Cities, a global network of nearly 100 mayors fighting climate change. You see climate action really grounded in the types of things that are going to help people. Shifting from a reliance on fossil fuels to clean energy isnt just about reducing a citys carbon emissions, but about creating jobs and saving moneya tangible argument that mayors can make to their people. Bibb said a pilot program in Cleveland that helped low- to moderate-income households get access to free solar panels ended up reducing their utility bills by 60%. The biggest concern for Americans right now isnt climate change, Bibb added. Its the cost of living, and so we have to marry these two things together, he said. I think mayors are in a very unique position to do that. To further reduce costs and emissions, cities like Seattle and Washington, D.C. are scrambling to better insulate structures, especially affordable housing, by installing double-paned windows and better insulation. In Boston last year, the city government started an Equitable Emissions Investment Fund, which awards money for projects that make buildings more efficient or add solar panels to their roofs. We are in a climate where energy efficiency remains the number one thing that we can do, said Oliver Sellers-Garcia, commissioner of the environment and Green New Deal director in the Boston government. And there are so many other comfort and health benefits from being in an efficient, all-electric environment. To that end, cities are deploying loads of heat pumps, hyper-efficient appliances that warm and cool a space. New York City, for instance, is spending $70 million to install 30,000 of the appliances in its public housing. The ultimate goal is to have as many heat pumps as possible running in energy-efficient homesalong with replacing gas stoves with induction rangesand drawing electricity from renewables. Metropolises like Los Angeles and Pittsburgh are creating new green spaces, which reduce urban temperatures and soak up rainwater to prevent flooding. A park is a prime example of multisolving: one intervention that fixes a bunch of problems at once. Another is deploying electric vehicle chargers in underserved neighborhoods, as Cleveland is doing, and making their use free for residents. This encourages the adoption of those vehicles, which reduces carbon emissions and air pollution. That, in turn, improves public health in those neighborhoods, which tend to have a higher burden of pollution than richer areas. Elizabeth Sawin, director of the Multisolving Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, said that these efforts will be more important than ever as the Trump administration cuts funding for health programs. If health care for poor children is going to be depletedwith, say, Medicaid under threatcities cant totally fix that, Sawin said. But if they can get cleaner air in cities, they can at least have fewer kids who are struggling from asthma attacks and other respiratory illnesses. All this workbuilding parks, installing solar panels, weatherizing buildingscreates jobs, both within a city and in surrounding rural areas. Construction workers commute in, while urban farms tap rural growers for their expertise. And as a city gets more of its power from renewables, it can benefit counties far away: The largest solar facility east of the Mississippi River just came online in downstate Illinois, providing so much electricity to Chicago that the citys 400 municipal buildings now run entirely on renewable power. The economic benefits and the jobs arent just necessarily accruing to the citieswhich might be seen as big blue cities, Johnson said. Theyre buying their electric school buses from factories in West Virginia, and theyre building solar and wind projects in rural areas. So cities arent just preparing themselves for a warmer future, but helping accelerate a transition to renewables and spreading economic benefits across the American landscape. We as elected officials have to do a better job of articulating how this important part of public policy is connected to the everyday lived experience, Bibb said. Unfortunately, my party has done a bad job of that. But I think as mayors, we are well positioned to make that case at the local level. Matt Simon, Grist This article originally appeared in Grist, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Sign up for its newsletter here.
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