In this video, Dezeen previews the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute's latest blockbuster fashion exhibition Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion, following last night's Met Gala.

The exhibition explores the concept of rebirth and renewal in fashion, showcasing the archival and restoration processes that take place behind the scenes of the Met's Costume Institute.

The exhibition brings together historical and contemporary pieces from the museum's archive

The show also uses nature as a visual metaphor to explore ideas around the transience of fashion.

In addition to bringing to life the behind-the-scenes work of fashion conservation, the exhibition also explores the sensory aspects of fashion, with visitors being encouraged to smell aromas of floral motifs, feel the textures of different embroideries, and talk to historical figures through the use of artificial intelligence (AI).

The title of the exhibition is derived from the "sleeping beauties" of the institute's archives – pieces that are too fragile to be displayed on mannequins. Instead, the exhibition uses AI, animation and X-rays to bring these historical garments to life for visitors.

Approximately 220 garments and accessories spanning four centuries will be on display as part of the show.

Sleeping Beauties will be open to the public from the 10th of May, following the annual Met Gala fundraiser, which took place yesterday and celebrated the exhibition's debut.

Celebrities interpreted the theme of The Garden of Time on the red carpet, with celebrities like Zendaya, Nicki Minaj and Gigi Hadid sporting floral motifs.

The exhibition was organised by Andrew Bolton, curator in charge of The Costume Institute, with photographer Nick Knight acting as creative consultant for the exhibition.

Exhibition design is by architecture studio Leong Leong in collaboration with The Met's Design Department.

Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion takes place from 10 May to 2 September at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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Local studio KOKO Architecture + Design has created a permanent interactive children's play space at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Located in the museum's 81st Street Studio, which was formally a library, the space contains a variety of multi-sensory analogue and digital play stations for children aged three to 11 in order to inspire creativity and exploration.

"Unlike in many of our galleries, we want you to touch everything," said Met CEO and director Max Hollein.

KOKO Architecture + Design founders Adam Weintraub and Mishi Hosono incorporated elements of the Met's collection both directly and indirectly into the space.

"It was challenging because the Met is encyclopedic, there's so much to draw from," Weintraub told Dezeen. Items were chosen to complement the STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) teaching philosophy of the centre.

"It was almost overwhelming, but one of the kind of guiding principles was this idea of STEAM with art layers. Every single element had to teach but also tie into the collection."

The designers split the 3,500-square-foot (325 square metre) space into two distinct levels, with a staircase, a "material passageway", a faux grass hill and an assortment of musical instruments, designed in collaboration with Yamaha, at the entrance.

The material passage, which runs along the length of a ramp, contains columns of wooden cladding and textures young guests can both touch and smell.

A panel of wooden screening was sourced directly from the museum after the designers were told it would be thrown out. Another wooden lattice texture is a reproduction of a screen found in the museum's Islamic collection.

Weintraub said that the screens will be changed out periodically.

Along with the material passage, a brightly coloured, rippled staircase leads to the next level, which contains seating areas, reading spaces, art-making stations and an interactive digital exhibition.

The studio installed a variety of subtle level changes amidst meandering paths.

"The idea is that adults can find their child but from a child's eye perspective, it's all these different worlds," said Weintraub. "They can run through them as often as they want."

On the far end of the space, a padded, sunken area provides spaces for children to play.

A large projection of tree branches covers the area, which, like other lighting integrated into the space, will change colours depending on the season.

Working with experience design firm Bluecadet, Weintraub and Hosono incorporated digital elements into the space like small circular screens built into cabinetry and arched lighting over reading spaces.

"There's a little subtle magic that is integrated," said Hosono. "It's not too overwhelming, the digital, because, of course, kids are drawn to the screen."

The space is largely clad in light wood panelling, with brightly coloured carpeting and finishing throughout.

"[Hosono] says to us, even though we're designing for kids we're not trying to dumb it down," said Weintraub. "It still has to be sophisticated."

"Even more sophisticated," Hosono added. "Because they are very honest."

KOKO Architecture + Design was founded in 2000 and is based in New York, New York. The studio specializes in early childhood education and children’s spaces.

Recently at the Met, artist Lauren Halsey covered an Eqyptian rooftop installation with LA street art and Frida Escobedo was announced as the architect for a redesign of the museum's Oscar L Tang and HM Agnes Hsu-Tang wing.

The photography is by Richard Lee, courtesy of the Met.

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American artist Lauren Halsey has completed a monumental installation on the rooftop garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City that adapts "elements of ancient Egyptian architecture and sculpture for a contemporary context".

Called Eastside of South Central Los Angeles Hieroglyph Prototype Architecture (I), the piece comprises four pillars and four sphinx statues that surround a cubic structure on a rooftop garden at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met).

While the architectural forms are decidedly Egyptian, the walls of the structure are adorned with engravings that recall the street art found in South Central Los Angeles, where Halsey grew up.

"My installation for The Met's roof garden reflects my interest in conflating narratives from contemporary South Central Los Angeles with those evoked in ancient pharaonic architecture," said the artist. "My hope is that viewers in New York feel the connections intuitively."

The work is 22 feet tall (6.7 metres) and includes 750 glass-fibre-reinforced concrete tiles.

Covering almost the entirety of the cubic structure and pillars are words and images observed by the artist in Los Angeles.

By presenting street art as hieroglyphics, the artist intended to present the work as an "architectural container of community archives and histories".

For the faces on the sphinx and at the heads of the pillars, Halsey took the visages of family and important members of the community, who, "act as guardians of the space".

Viewers are able to engage directly with the work, walking through and around the objects.

Inside the cubic structure, part of the roof has been left open, creating a skylight, while entrances were cut from the corner of the structure, giving it a top-heavy feel.

While the street art hieroglyphics cover the walls, the pedestals for the sphinx and the pillars are adorned with a geometric pattern, as are the small benches between the pillars.

Met director Max Hollein commented that the work "channels" the ancient Egypt collections found at the museum through the "lens of Afrofuturism".

"Engaging with the past, while also exploring a space of speculative imagination, Halsey offers us a powerful statement about civic space, social activism, and a reconsideration of the possibilities for architecture and community engagement," he said.

After the work is removed the artist plans on relocating it to a community arts centre in Los Angeles. The work is the 10th installation to be installed on The Roof Garden Commission as part of an ongoing art series at the museum.

Other works of Afrofuturism in design and architecture include a collection of chairs by designer Jomo Tariku used for the sets of the movie Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

The photography is by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metrpolitan Museum of Art. 

Eastside of South Central Los Angeles Hieroglyph Prototype Architecture (I) is on view at the Met from 18 April to 22 October 2023. For more exhibitions, installations and talks on architecture and design visit Dezeen's Events Guide. 

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has announced that it has chosen Mexican architect Frida Escobedo to design the new Oscar L Tang and HM Agnes Hsu-Tang Wing, which was previously assigned to David Chipperfield Architects.

The Met announced on Monday 14 March 2022 that 43-year-old Escobedo will take over from Chipperfield, after seven years of growing costs and lack of funding for his studio's design.

Donations from the Tangs, trustees of the museum, will now allow the long-standing project to move forward with a new prospective design will include 80,000 square feet (7,400 square metres) of gallery and public space, according to the museum.

"Frida Escobedo is an outstanding architect of our time," said The Met director Max Hollein in a release. "In her practice, she wields architecture as a way to create powerful spatial and communal experiences, and she has shown dexterity and sensitivity in her elegant use of material while bringing sincere attention to today's socioeconomic and ecological issues."

The new wing will be home to the museum's collection of modern art, encompassing works from the 20th and 21st century, including a collection of Cubist paintings gifted to the museum.

While no plans for the design have been released, the museum said that it expects a "building that respects and connects with the Museum’s archipelago of architectural styles as well as its spatial organisation and infrastructure".

According to the New York Times, David Chipperfield Architects released a tweet expressing sadness over the end of the seven-year commitment to the design, but congratulated Escobedo. The tweet was later deleted.

Escobedo founded her eponymous studio in 2006 and was the youngest architect ever to design the Serpentine Pavilion in London, which she spoke about in this exclusive movie for Dezeen.

In 2019, Escobedo was one of 32 architects to design buildings for an experimental community in Hidalgo, Mexico.

The opening photo is by Ste Murray.

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Set designer Es Devlin has created two clock-like gallery spaces for the latest fashion exhibition at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, which compares design over 150 years.

The Met's Costume Institute opens About Time: Fashion and Duration at the museum's Fifth Avenue location on 29 October –  the original planned opening in May 2020 was postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Featured fashion dates back 150 years to 1870 to coincide with The Met's 150th anniversary. Rather than presenting designs chronologically, the exhibition mixes up the timeline in order to compare the cyclical nature of fashion across the years.

"About Time: Fashion and Duration considers the ephemeral nature of fashion, employing flashbacks and fast-forwards to reveal how it can be both linear and cyclical," said The Met director Max Hollein.

"The result is a show that presents a nuanced continuum of fashion over the museum's 150-year history."

Devlin, who has created stage sets for musicians The Weekend and Katy Perry, worked with The Met's Design Department to create a time-travelling-themed exhibition.

It is located in two galleries in the museum's Iris and B Gerald Cantor Exhibition Hall that are in a circular formation like a clock. Called Clock One and Clock Two, they have different material finishes. The former is nearly all black, and the latter is covered in mirrors.

White markings on the floor or thin white lights punctuate both spaces, resembling the marks on a clock face.

These marks split the galleries into 60 segments or "minutes". Each minute showcases two garments – one that follows time chronologically and another from a different time period to showcase similarities or differences in form.

Examples include an 1870s black silk faille princess-line dress paired with a 1990s Alexander McQueen skirt and a mid-1890s silk satin dress with puffed sleeves contrasted by 2004 Comme des Garçons ensemble.

"Fashion is indelibly connected to time," said Andrew Bolton, the Wendy Yu curator in charge of The Costume Institute.

"It not only reflects and represents the spirit of the times, but it also changes and develops with the times, serving as an especially sensitive and accurate timepiece."

There are 125 fashions in the exhibition with a number sourced from The Costume Insitute's collection. It includes work from well-known contemporary and historic designers and brands like Virgil Abloh, Azzedine Alaïa, Jonathan Anderson, Iris van Herpen, Karl Lagerfeld and Vivienne Westwood.

First announced last year, The Met's About Time exhibition is based on French 20th-century philosopher Henri Bergson's idea of time as la durée, or duration – something which can be measured through images but never perceived as a whole.

The Met closed its main building on Fifth Avenue, as well as its Met Breuer and Met Cloisters locations, in early March in response to the emergence of outbreaks of coronavirus in New York City.

In lieu of the spring opening, the museum created a virtual version of About Time: Fashion and Duration on Youtube.

The annual Costume Institute Benefit, also known as the Met Gala, was due to take place in May 2020 to coincide with the original opening of the exhibition. It was also cancelled due to the pandemic.

The Met's Costume Institute organises a spring exhibition every year. Last year's exhibition Camp: Notes on Fashion celebrated the "resurgence of camp", while the 2018 showcase Heavenly Bodies was themed on religion.

Others have included a retrospective of Comme des Garcons founder Rei Kawakubo, a study of handcraft and machine production and an exploration of China.

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Abraham Thomas, former director of the Sir John Soane's Museum, has been named curator of architecture and design at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Thomas said he was "thrilled and honored" to join The Met as Thomas in the newly created role, Daniel Brodsky Curator of Modern Architecture, Design, and Decorative Arts.

The role is an expansion of the position of Daniel Brodsky Associate Curator of Architecture and Design, which was first created in 2014 and held by British curator Beatrice Galilee.

Previous roles at Smithsonian Institution and V&A

The position follows a number of architecture and design curatorial roles Thomas has held at institutions in the US and UK – including the Smithsonian Institution, Sir John Soane's Museum and the V&A.

"He brings with him vast and varied experience and expertise, as well as a proven enthusiastic embrace of collaboration using an innovative approach," said The Met director Max Hollein.

"Abraham will be a driving force for our rethinking of how we best present, contextualise and collect the intersections, commonalities, and joint ambitions of art, architecture and design."

Thomas joins The Met at "critical moment"

In his new role, Thomas will be "re-envisioning a powerful programme" that responds to current global events, according to department chairman Sheena Wagstaff.

"Abraham joins the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at a critical moment, as we develop vital new narratives around architecture and design – especially those that engage with a global context in dialogue with historical examples – drawing upon collections at The Met that are unparalleled in their scope and depth," she said.

"We are eager to set to work re-envisioning a powerful programme that fully integrates architecture and design into our display of the arts of the 20th and 21st century, using these practices as starting points for a new approach."

Thomas most recently worked at the Smithsonian Institution serving as its senior curator at the Arts & Industries Building in Washington DC, following a stint as a curator of the institute's Renwick Gallery American art museum.

Thomas was curator of designs at V&A

As director of the Sir John Soane's Museum – a London museum that was once the home of neoclassical architect John Soane in the 19th century – from 2013 to 2015 Thomas oversaw a redesign of the interiors. He also initiated programmes with educational institutions including MIT's School of Architecture and Planning, The Architectural Association, London School of Economics and the School of Art, Architecture and Design at London Metropolitan University.

Thomas was curator of designs at the Victoria and Albert Museum from 2005 to 2013, overseeing its Architecture Gallery and partnership with the Royal Institute of British Architects. Heatherwick Studio: Designing the Extraordinary and 1:1 - Architects Build Small Spaces were among the exhibitions he curated during his time there.

He also co-curated Superstructures: The New Architecture, 1960–1990 in 2018 for the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in the UK, which is regarded as one of the first exhibitions to thoroughly explore High-tech architecture.

In addition, he has published works and lectured on architecture, decorative arts, craft, graphic design and photography.

Galilee, who left her position Daniel Brodsky Associate Curator of Architecture and Design last year, established and ran the architecture series In Our Time: A Year of Architecture in a Day event from 2016 to 2019.

Portrait of Abraham Thomas is courtesy of The Met.

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Mexican artist Héctor Zamora has created a perforated brick wall to frame views of New York's skyline for an installation on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Zamora's Lattice Detour compries a gridded brick wall that is 11 feet (3.3 metres) tall on the rooftop of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, also known at The Met.

The wall gently curves in an arc and spans approximately 100 feet (30 metres) in length.

It is built with terracotta bricks made from Mexican earth laid out a lattice-like construction with thousands of hollow squares to frame views of the city skyline and Central Park.

The perforated chunks of Lattice Detour allow air to flow through space and also creates shade and filters sunlight.

Zamora referenced the perforated screens found in Middle Eastern and African architecture to create the design. Known as celosía walls, the dividers are often made with natural materials and provide ventilation and shade naturally.

"Using modest material, Hector Zamora's Lattice Detour interrupts and refocuses how visitors interact with this beloved space, situated atop The Met and surrounded by the Manhattan skyline, creating a meditation on movement, transparency, and interference," said The Met director Max Hollein.

"Manifesting itself as a protective wall, curved artwork, and permeable screen, Lattice Detour is a transformative, charged, and timely intervention."

Mexican architect Frida Escobedo has referenced celosía walls for her 2018 Serpentine Pavilion in London and for an Aesop store in Brooklyn that also uses reddish bricks from Mexico.

Zamora's wall cuts across The Met's open-air cafe the Iris and B Gerald Cantor Roof Garden, which reopened to the public along with the museum itself on 29 August after being closed since March because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The site-specific installation is part of the museum's annual commission for its roof space and is open from 29 August to 7 December.

In 2017 Adrián Villar Rojas created a concept with white banquet tables for the project, and the year before Cornelia Parker built a Hitchcock-influenced structure. In 2015 Pierre Huyghe installed an aquarium with ancient species.

Photography is by Anna-Marie Kellen courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art has created a virtual version of its About Time: Fashion and Duration exhibition, which has been postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The Met's Costume Institute has made a short Youtube video of the museum's annual major spring exhibition to coincide with its original opening date this week. It will now open 29 October 2020.

Called About Time: Fashion and Duration, the exhibition is based on French 20th-century philosopher Henri Bergson's idea of time as la durée, or duration, something which can be measured through images but never perceived as a whole.

Lasting nearly 12 minutes, the virtual tour follows the intended format for the exhibition by showing historical and contemporary creations designs side by side to reveal similarities – such as a 1895 Mrs Arnold and a 2004 creation by Comme Des Garçons.

Images of the dresses – which are taken in The Costume Institute's collection – are shown with the year they were created and details of the designer or era to gradually explore fashion from 1870 to present day.

Other likenesses are drawn between a 1902 Morin Blossier dress and 2018 design by Nicolas Ghesquiere for Louis Vuitton.

Throughout the black-and-white movie illustrations of pared-back clock faces allude to the exhibit's time-travelling theme.

The moving images are also interspersed with quotations from novels by English writer Virginia Woolf such as Mrs Dalloway and Orlando. Woolf, who died in 1941, will serve as the exhibition's "ghost narrator".

About Time: Fashion and Duration was due to open on 7 May 202o, forming part of the museum's 150th-anniversary celebrations. The timeline used for the outfits begins with 1870 – the year The Met was founded.

The real-like showcase will include 160 items and a set designed Es Devlin.

The annual Costume Institute Benefit, also known as the Met Gala, was due to take place last night to coincide with the opening of the exhibition. It was also canceled due to the pandemic.

The Met closed its main building on Fifth Avenue, as well as its Met Breuer and Met Cloisters locations, in early March in response to the emergence of outbreaks of coronavirus in New York City.

At the same time, US schools including Harvard University, Stanford University, Columbia University and Yale University suspended in-person lessons and switching to digital learning materials and lectures.

A number of other events in North America like Toronto technology conference Collision, the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin have also decided to replace their physical events with virtual versions.

Burning Man cancelled its Black Rock City event this year and revealed plans to host a virtual alternative due to the "painful reality of Covid-19".

The Met's annual spring exhibit opening and Met Gala take place each year in early May.

Last year the exhibition and Met Gala theme was based around the American writer Susan Sontag's 1964 essay Notes on Camp.

Following the gala, trend forecaster Li Edelkoort said that the celebrities attending not only misunderstood the concept of camp, but showed levels of waste that will lead to a backlash against displays of decadence in an Opinion piece for Dezeen.

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New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA and Guggenheim museums have closed indefinitely in a bid to contain the spread of coronavirus in the city.

The Met was the first to announce that it will shutter its main building on Fifth Avenue, as well as its Met Breuer and Met Cloisters locations, on Friday 13 March.

"The Met's priority is to protect and support our staff, volunteers, and visitors," said Daniel Weiss, the Met’s president and chief executive in a statement.

The Met to "undertake a thorough cleaning"

MoMA and the Solomon R Guggenheim museum revealed shortly after that they too would shut in a bid to maintain the spread of response to outbreaks of COVID-19 coronavirus. New York City had 62 confirmed cases at the time of The Met's announcement.

The Met, which revealed the news on 12 March, said in a statement that it intends to "undertake a thorough cleaning" of the museum buildings. It added that the closures are expected to last for several weeks.

According to a report by The New York Times, The Met had two members of staff who showed symptoms of the virus, although neither have been confirmed.

"While we don't have any confirmed cases connected to the museum, we believe that we must do all that we can to ensure a safe and healthy environment for our community, which at this time calls for us to minimise gatherings while maintaining the cleanest environment possible," Weiss said.

Guggenheim and MoMA also close

The Met's main location on Fifth Avenue, which just opened its British Galleries redesigned by local firm Roman and Williams, is joined by two other outposts in the city.

They include Marcel Breuer-designed Met Breuer building on the Upper East Side and The Cloisters museum in Fort Tryon Park in the Washington Heights neighbourhood in north Manhattan.

The institution was the first museum in the city to announce its closure in response to the coronavirus outbreak.

Solomon R Guggenheim, which just opened Rem Koolhaas' Countryside, The Future exhibition, announced its closure shortly afterwards. The museum's director Richard Armstrong described the decision as "prudent and necessary".

"We have made this decision in consultation with New York-area peer institutions," Armstrong said. "We hope that in the coming weeks we can once again invite visitors to enjoy the museum."

MoMA, which is showcasing Neri Oxman's body of works, also followed suit. "Nothing is more important to MoMA than the health and safety of our community," Glenn D Lowry, The David Rockefeller director, said in a statement. "We take seriously our responsibility as a civic institution to serve the public good."

US institutions respond to virus outbreaks

The museums are the latest US institutions to respond to the virus as it continues to spread across the country.

US schools including Harvard University, Stanford University, Columbia University and Yale University are suspending in-person lessons and switching to digital learning materials and lectures.

They form part of a number of institutions and studios forced to take activities online to avoid real-world interactions.

Conferences and events across North America have also been cancelled, postponed or moved to digital formats. The Toronto technology conference Collision, the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin have all decided to replace their physical events with virtual versions, while Californian music festival Coachella has been postponed from April to October.

Photograph by Arad, courtesy of Wikipedia.

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Fashion "flashbacks and fast-forwards" will be the theme of next year's major fashion exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, with exhibition design by Es Devlin.

Called About Time: Fashion and Duration, the spring 2020 exhibition at the Met's Costume Institute will explore the nature of time. It will form part of the museum's 150-year anniversary celebrations.

Set designer Es Devlin will work with the design department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to create the exhibition, which opens in May next year.

Spanning more than a century and a half, the exhibition will guide visitors through fashion from 1870 to the present, and back again.

"This exhibition will consider the ephemeral nature of fashion, employing flashbacks and fast-forwards to reveal how it can be both linear and cyclical," said Max Hollein, director of The Met.

Most of the 160 items in the show will be taken from the The Costume Institute's extensive collection.

By contrasting black and white outfits, the exhibition will move away from a traditional, chronological order that breaks fashion history down into a history of silhouettes.

The black outfits will follow a linear progression from 1870 – the year the Met was founded – to the present. Juxtaposed ensembles in white, made before or after the black pieces but sharing a motif, silhouette, material or technique, will offer a counterpoint and a connection.

An Alexander McQueen Bumster skirt, 1995, will be displayed next to a princess-line dress from the late 1870s in black silk, and a black, silk-velvet bustle outfit from the 1880s can be seen next to a Comme des Garçons piece from 1997, Body Meets Dress–Dress Meets Body.

A section at the end of the exhibition will look forward to the future of fashion, examining issues around sustainability.

"Fashion is indelibly connected to time," said Andrew Bolton, the Wendy Yu curator in charge of The Costume Institute.

"It not only reflects and represents the spirit of the times, but it also changes and develops with the times, serving as an especially sensitive and accurate timepiece. Through a series of chronologies, the exhibition will use the concept of duration to analyse the temporal twists and turns of fashion history."

About Time: Fashion and Duration will be guided by the work of the French 20th-century philosopher Henri Bergson. His philosophy of la durée, or duration, conceives of time as something that cannot be divided up into minutes or hours, but should be understood in its multiplicity.

His work informed modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf in her novels Mrs Dalloway and Orlando. Woolf will be one of the exhibition's "ghost narrators" as fashion is used to explore the theme of temporality, and vice versa.

The exhibition catalogue will feature a new short story by Michael Cunningham, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, The Hours, which drew inspiration from Mrs Dalloway.

Last year the exhibition and Met Gala theme was based around the American writer Susan Sontag's 1964 essay Notes on Camp.

Set against a Pepto-pink backdrop, 175 items on display next to letters, paintings and objects explored how fashion has always played with the idea of camp as defined in Sontag's seminal text.

Next year's Met Gala will be 4 May 2020, when celebrities and fashion notables will take up the challenge of dressing to the theme of the exhibition. Landscape architect Miranda Brooks will devise the decor for the benefit party.

About Time: Fashion and Duration will run from 7 May 2020 until September 7 2020.

Images courtesy of The Met unless otherwise stated.

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Celebrities attending the Met Gala not only misunderstood the concept of camp, but showed levels of waste that will lead to a backlash against displays of decadence, says Li Edelkoort.

With growing unease I witnessed the spectacle at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the temple of culture as we once knew it. The displayed extravaganza, outdoing all other Met Galas in recent history, was of indescribable character, acting without restraint – a violent act of haughtiness, displaying a deep disdain for everybody else, for ordinary people.

The flow of famous individuals was endless in its useless vanity and uncertainty. Many great stars, visibly on edge for their act of great entrance, were seen shaky on their feet, babbling to their publicists, aggressing their stylists and clinging to their designers; desperately hunting for cameras to capture their image in order to merit their endorsement of a major piece of jewellery.

Walking back and forth like deer blinded by headlights, they gradually understood that their moment was wasted. And awkwardly joined the silent majority of those actually paying for the benefit – the grey haired, bespectacled, rather graceful and invisible one percent.

Silently, and heads bend so as not to be discovered. They looked like the empathic slaves to this ephemeral exposition consecrated to extreme narcissistic behaviour; paying penitence for their accumulated billions. To be appropriate they would nevertheless hire a curator of clothes in order to make their final choices, sometimes sending up to a hundred couture items to be sampled from. Having a debilitating amount of money doesn't make people more self-assured, it actually undermines ego.

The deep lack of impeccable historic insight and curatorial delight displayed in the exhibition was absent in the choices of the people present and made for shared public embarrassment

The greatly misunderstood concept of camp as described by the great Susan Sontag was leading to cabaret, carnival and at best clownish styling, with canes, top hats and bare limbs in fish netting, all out for the big catch.

The knowledge and suaveness, even the innocence and joy of the underground movements as captured in Paris Is Burning and The Rocky Horror Show of my youth are terribly missed. The only convincing characters were the oldest actresses; they naturally looked to be cross-dressing.

As always shine, feathers, sequins and rhinestones are amongst the favourite ingredients for the night while organdie made its cameo appearance. Capes and trails and headdresses made for the key paraphernalia.

The deep lack of impeccable historic insight and curatorial delight displayed in this year's exhibition at the Costume Institute, called Camp: Notes on Fashion, was absent in the choices of the people present and made for shared public embarrassment. Makeup artists all followed the same lead by transforming eyelashes into petals, pine needles, plumes and more; the interest in female surrealism certainly being the major inspiration. The eye is on her. The only great person missing seemed to be Frida, holding court at the Brooklyn Museum, we did greatly miss discerning eyebrows.

The knowledge and suaveness, even the innocence and joy of the underground movements as captured in Paris Is Burning and The Rocky Horror Show of my youth are terribly missed

The resulting doll's eyes were magnified by the ever-active Lady Gaga who needed a full 20 minutes to do her entrance act in multiple chapters. After having shown her bare and beautiful self in her recent film it was an act of vaudeville that was executed in an embarrassing bad manner, a disturbing point in her career as a public icon. Difficult to comprehend, what lured her into revolving into her same old self?

Hesitation upon hesitation; not securing poses, not striding steps, not finding the pockets of her garment, not dealing with the gilded stroller for her oversized coordinated travel bags. I could just feel how she hated every minute of having to go back to a person she no longer incarnates.

I felt great empathy with her suffering. She even couldn't find the cameras, which is weird and unnerving for a chanteuse of her stature. As the star of stars didn't know how to enlarge her ego further how does this instruct society?

The display of waste was mesmerising and sickening, as in reaching and overstepping suddenly a limit

Her insane entrance cloak, made of fuchsia pink silk was using up enough fabric to dress twenty poor ravishing girls. The big black dress (oh how we regret the little one nowadays!) used enough fabric for an emerging talent to tailor his debut collection.

The display of waste was mesmerising and sickening, as in reaching and overstepping suddenly a limit. The same day the UN published a scientific survey that certified that because of human greed, excess, waste and abuse of our habitat we will lose one million species; animals, trees, plants and foods.

When the flush gates were opened and the vomiting waste of wealth gushed onto the pink carpet a violent sense of anger engulfed me, of a magnitude that I have never experienced.

I am normally a peaceful and centered person. The amount of abundance displayed at this rare moment of dancing again around the golden cow, which should have been great for the city, the museum, the curator, the magazine and the editor-in-chief, suddenly turned into an overwhelming premonition of direct and impending danger. Even my vodka and cheese cracker couldn't kill the rage in me or crack me up with laughter. There was no humour to be found in any of the accoutrements.

Dressed in a virgin blue ruffled habit with a pink corsage, a trembling and at times skittish camera filmed a beautiful young actress named Lily Reinhart for minutes on end against a dense hay of fresh roses brought in for the evening.

Soon the maddening crowds of have-nots would seek out the haves with settling scores in mind

Without any notice, and without hesitation, my mind time-travelled to Marie Antoinette as pictured by Fragonard and with a sudden deep sinking sense of doom reached the bottom of my being as I understood that this was the end of it.

The moment of reversal was coming, the tipping point was unavoidable, the beheading of culture irrevocable. Soon the maddening crowds of have-nots would seek out the haves with settling scores in mind. That history would repeat itself punishing not the walled-in lifestyle of the rich and famous, but castigating the incessant aggression of the indecent display of decadence in the public eye, a display that can no longer be contained by the people press selling these dreams.

In front of my university a man is making home with tons of debris, my students are starving, my artist friends have to steal food to survive, colleagues have not been rewarded since a decade, and Karl has displayed a yellow vest. Lagerfeld was forever leading and guiding us into the future. He decided to leave so as not to witness the massacre.

As the dolled up dream turned into an ever-greater nightmare of obvious condescendence I was cruelly confirmed in my haunting vision of the beheaded royals when Jared Leto walked in with his own severed head, potently and beautifully predicting our future.

Photography courtesy of Getty.

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This week on Dezeen, a theatrical Met Gala marked the opening of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's camp fashion exhibition in New York.

The 2019 Spring exhibit, named Camp: Notes on Fashion, was curated by The Met in response to the "resurgence of camp", and popularity of deliberately exaggerated fashion.

Visitors are welcomed by meandering, pink exhibition spaces, which are filled with vitrines displaying effeminate sculptures, paintings and drawings dating back to the 17th century.

The exhibition's opening was marked by the museum's annual Met Gala event, which saw a number of celebrity guests arrive in ostentatious clothing to match the theme.

Among the most innovative outfits were British model Jourdan Dunn's dress constructed from 3D-printed petals and American actress Zendaya's colour-changing Cinderella gown.

In the architecture world, a social housing revamp in Bordeaux was announced as the winner of this year's Mies van der Rohe Award.

SHoP unveiled its visuals for an irregularly stacked office for the US Embassy in Bangkok, and OMA completed its overhaul of Sotheby's galleries at its New York headquarters.

Dezeen also reported on the news that construction is set to begin on Frank Gehry's long-awaited Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, over a decade since the design was first revealed.

UK news this week included the reveal of Allford Hall Monaghan Morris' design for a temporary replacement for the House of Commons, which will house the UK Parliament while the Palace of Westminster is restored.

The government promised to pay £200 million to replace combustible cladding found on 176 privately-owned high-rise towers, following the Grenfell Tower fire two years ago.

Chinese design was in the spotlight as Dezeen interviewed Li Xiaodong, who stated that architects must gain the confidence to develop China's rural areas sustainably.

In another interview, Peter Horbury said that there is  "no stopping" the country's car design industry, now that Chinese companies are putting their history of copying behind them.

In the design world, former Frieze artistic director Abby Bangser established an alternative to traditional art fairs called Object & Thing. It aims to offer exhibitors fewer restrictions and lower prices.

Meanwhile in London Craft Week is taking place – Dezeen's design editor Augusta Pownall picked out six of the best events taking place.

Popular projects on Dezeen this week included a concrete house with a glass rooftop pool, an apartment with moody grey interiors and a labyrinth-like house in Japan.

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American fashion designer Zac Posen has created a dress constructed from 3D-printed petals, which was worn by British model Jourdan Dunn at this year's Met Gala in New York.

The bespoke gown features 21 unique overlapping petals, each around 50 centimetres in size and weighing 450 grams. Each petal is estimated to be worth around $3,000.

Built in sets of three, each petal took around 100 hours to print using a precision stereolithography machine at low-volume 3D-printing specialist Protolabs' facility in North Carolina.

The petals were printed in a durable white plastic, before being primed, sprayed with a colour-shifting paint commonly used for cars, and finished with a clear gloss. The printing and finish of the entire dress took more than 1,100 hours.

The dress was worn by Dunn at the gala to mark the opening of this year's exhibition at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Its body was created by bolting the petals to a frame and fastened them in place on a modular cage, which can't be seen from the outside.

The frame was 3D-printed in titanium using electron beam melting technology at the Cincinnati plant of GE Additive, the additive manufacturing arm of General Electric.

Designed to be a 3D re-creation of Dunn's body, the dress weighed nearly 14 kilograms and can be reconfigured to create a longer design with the addition of up to 16 further petals.

"I dreamt the collection, GE Additive helped engineer it and Protolabs printed it," said Posen.

Posen dressed four further members of his party in 3D-printed outfits created with the same team of collaborators, including a 3D-printed bustier that took more than 200 hours to complete, a palm leaf collar produced in the same manner, a gown with 3D-printed embroidery and a vine-pattern headdress.

American actress Zendaya was also a guest at the event on Monday night, wearing a dress designed by Tommy Hilfiger that changed colour from grey to a luminous pale blue at the wave of her stylist's wand.

The theme of the Met Gala and rose-hued exhibition at the museum's Costume Institute this year is Camp: Notes on Fashion, exploring the influence of camp culture on clothing across the centuries.

Image courtesy of Getty.

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The Met's Costume Institute has unveiled a pink-hued exhibition exploring camp fashion across the centuries, from the playful to the outrageous.

Camp: Notes on Fashion opens this week, following the Met Gala on Monday. Camp was chosen as the theme, thanks to the rising trend for deliberately exaggerated and theatrical fashion.

"We are experiencing a resurgence of camp," said Andrew Bolton, chief curator for the Costume Institute, at a launch event earlier this week.

Although usually associated with LGBT culture, the word camp describes anything that is intentionally ostentatious or excessively effeminate.

"This exhibition might raise more questions than it answers: 'Is camp gay' 'Is camp political?' And, ultimately, 'What is camp?'," reads a statement from The Met.

"There are periods, however, including the 1960s, the 1980s, and the era in which we live now, when camp comes to the fore as the defining aesthetic of the times," it said.

"It is no coincidence that camp resurfaces during moments of social, political, and economic instability – when society is polarised – because, despite its mainstreaming, it has never lost its power to subvert and to challenge the status quo."

The show features meandering exhibition spaces, all coloured in a vivid shade of pink.

Glass vitrines display objects from The Met's collection with a camp sensibility, including sculptures, paintings and drawings dating from the 17th century to the present. There are also 140 fashion ensembles on show.

Guiding the entire exhibition is Susan Sontag's seminal 1964 essay, Notes on Camp, which describes camp as an aesthetic. The work was so influential that it catapulted the word camp into mainstream culture.

The essay features at the start of the exhibition, in a study of the etymology and origins of camp. Another installation displays Sontag's 58 principles of camp, which include irony, humour, parody, pastiche, artifice, theatricality and exaggeration.

Sontag's words also crop up again in an echo chamber that concludes the show.

This dark, double-height room is filled with colourful glass fronted boxes containing examples of camp fashion, with titles like Gender without Genitals, and Dandyism in the Age of Mass Culture.

Layered audio snippets create the echo-chamber effect. Many of these are Sontag's original quotes, spoken by prolific fashion designers, and overlaid with interjections of Judy Garland singing Over the Rainbow.

"Camp’s disruptive nature and subversion of modern aesthetic values has often been trivialised, but this exhibition reveals that it has had a profound influence on both high art and popular culture," said Max Hollein, director of The Met.

"By tracing its evolution and highlighting its defining elements, the show embodies the ironic sensibilities of this audacious style, challenges conventional understandings of beauty and taste, and establishes the critical role that this important genre has played in the history of art and fashion."

One of the first rooms in the show includes an Italian bronze statue of a boy, which was part of a collection belonging to King Louis XIV of France. It features in a room themed Beau Ideal, in reference to an early 19th-century concept of male beauty.

The exhibit continues with more art relating to Versailles, the royal courts of Louis XIV and Louis XV, and objects exploring the figure of the dandy.

The exhibit then traces camp's origins to the queer subcultures of Europe and America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Designers featured include Vivienne Westwood, Karl Lagerfeld, Chanel, Erdem, Jeremy Scott and Maison Margiela. Also included are outfits worn by Anglo-Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde, who is inextricably linked to the image of the effeminate aristocrat.

The Met's Costume Institute organises a spring exhibition every year. Last year's, Heavenly Bodies, was themed on religion, while others have included a retrospective of Comme des Garcons founder Rei Kawakubo, a study of handcraft and machine production, and an exploration of China.

Camp: Notes on Fashion opens to the public on 9 May 2019 and runs until 8 September 2019.

Photography is by Zach Hilty courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Project credits:

Exhibit curators: Andrew Bolton, Karen Van Godtsenhoven, Amanda Garfinkel
Exhibit design: Jan Versweyveld, Raul Avila
Headdress design: Stephen Jones

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American actress Zendaya wore a transforming Tommy Hilfiger dress to the Met Gala last night, which changed colour using technology hidden beneath the skirt.

The actress arrived at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art for the gala wearing a full-length grey dress with puffed sleeves modelled on the blue ballgown worn by Cinderella in the Disney cartoon, accompanied by her stylist Law Roach.

At the entrance to the event, Roach waved a smoke-emitting wand and the dress slowly transformed from bottom to top, from a grey colour to a glowing pale blue shade.

Tommy Hilfiger described the dress as "an animatronic crystal-grey silk evening gown constructed to enable both visual and physical transformations of the silhouette from understated to dramatic". It said that the outfit "culminated with the gown evolving to the colour blue for its final look".

Zendaya posted a series of images on Instagram that showed dress fittings, and gave a glimpse of the wiring and technology hidden beneath the bustle of the gown, which was responsible for the transformation.

The accompanying caption drew attention to the behind-the-scenes work: "Underneath the magic. Thank you to all the very very smart people who somehow built and made this dress work."

Roach also posted an image on Instagram of the pair arriving at the event.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

Our 1st Met together.... thank you to the amazing @tommyhilfiger team, @lancomeofficial for providing my grooming and @jacobandco for making my nite so special. Cinderella and her FAIRY GODBROTHER

A post shared by Law Roach (@luxurylaw) on May 6, 2019 at 10:20pm PDT

No details have currently been released explaining the technology used to make the colour change possible. It could have worked in a similar way to Intimacy – a collection of dresses by Studio Roosegaarde that change from opaque to transparent, through the use of electrically sensitive foils.

According to Vogue magazine, the dress was partly inspired by fashion designer Hussein Chalayan's Spring 2007 collection.

The closing look of Chalayan's show was a robotic dress that peeled back its layers, leaving the model naked. Another dress in the tech-inspired futurist show had a skirt made from a series of overlapping panels that mechanically lifted on robotic arms.

"We hunted down the people who created the technology used in the Chalayan show and who did all the mechanics to create those garments, then brought them to Tommy to collaborate with us on this," said Roach to Vogue.

"It has to be literal enough so that people get it," the stylist said. "When you see Cinderella, you know right away it's her; the baby blue dress and the hair and the French twist it all works together."

To complete the look, Zendaya carried a small bag in the shape of the pumpkin coach from Disney's 1950 animation of Cinderella, her hair was styled in a similar style as the character in the film, and she wore clear high-heeled pumps, in a nod to the glass slipper.

The outfit was designed in response to the theme of this year's event and exhibition, Camp: Notes on Fashion. The 2019 show refers to the name of a 1964 essay by American writer Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp.

The Met Gala announces the opening of the major fashion exhibition on the same theme, at the museum's Costume Institute.

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Watch OMA, MAD, Forensic Architecture and more deliver presentations at the architecture symposium hosted by New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The In Our Time: A Year of Architecture in a Day event – spotlighting the most exciting and innovative projects from the past 12 months – was streamed live from the Fifth Avenue museum's Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, via The Met's Facebook page.

The first part of the afternoon session is available to watch above

The symposium was spilt into three sessions, as outlined on The Met website, and featured an introduction given by The Met's Beatrice Galilee, who organised the programme.

The morning session of In Our Time talks is available to watch above

Following her, Kunlé Adeyemi of NLÉ, Ma Yansong of MAD Architects, Frida Escobedo, Liam Young, Chasper Schmidlin and Lukas Voellmy, and Minsuk Cho of Mass Studies all presented their work.

Galilee moderated a conversation with architect Elizabeth Diller and composer David Lang about their Mile Long Opera, which took place along Manhattan's High Line park.

A second group of speakers talked about their 2018 projects, including Jing Liu of SO-IL, Michael Rakowitz, Carla Juaçaba, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Ellen van Loon of OMA, and Freddy Mamani.

This was followed by a panel discussion about design and architecture in the age of artificial intelligence. Speakers included artist and author James Bridle, photographer Vincent Fournier and AI Now Institute co-director Kate Crawford, with moderator Ute Meta Bauer, director of the Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore.

To round off the symposium, Eyal Weizman gave a keynote presentation about his research group Forensic Architecture, and the work they do to investigate cases of state violence and violations of human rights around the world.

Dezeen is media partner for In Our Time: A Year of Architecture in a Day for the third consecutive year. Videos of past symposia in the series, featuring projects from 2017 and 2016, are also still available to watch.

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Dezeen promotion: a day of architecture talks will take place Saturday 19 January 2019 at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, with Forensic Architecture's Eyal Weizman and OMA's Ellen van Loon on the roster of speakers.

Dezeen is media partner for the third edition of In Our Time: A Year of Architecture in a Day, which will unfold at the Fifth Avenue museum's Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium from 10:30am to 6:30pm.

As in previous years, the symposium will offer an overview of important spatial projects undertaken or completed over the past 12 months.

"The event will present a global spectrum of innovative and socially conscious architecture, contemporary art, photography, and cutting-edge research," said a statement from The Met.

This year's keynote presentation will be given by architect Eyal Weizman, who will discuss the work of his research agency Forensic Architecture, which applies strategic visualisation practices to politics, complex court cases, and conflict zones.

"The Forensic Architecture agency is committed to developing and disseminating new evidentiary techniques and works on behalf of international prosecutors, human rights and civil society groups, and political and environmental justice organisations," said The Met's statement.

Also on the line-up is MAD Architects founder Ma Yansong, who will outline the challenges faced during the construction of his ambitious Huangshan Mountain Village in China.

Mexican architect Frida Escobedo will talk about her Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, erected in London's Kensington Gardens last summer, while Ellen van Loon of OMA will share details on the Qatar National Library.

The Met's architecture and design curator Beatrice Galilee – who has organised the symposium – will lead a conversation between Diller Scofidio + Renfro founding partner Elizabeth Diller and composer David Lang.

The trio will discuss the Mile-Long Opera, which took place along New York's High Line park in October 2018.

Another panel discussion titled In Our Future – Design in a Post-Human Age will feature AI Now Institute co-director Kate Crawford, artist and author James Bridle, and photographer Vincent Fournier. Moderated by Ute Meta Bauer, director of the Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, the group will explore themes around design and architecture in an era of artificial intelligence.

Other speakers throughout the day will include architects Jing Liu of SO-IL, Kunlé Adeyemi of NLÉ, and Minsuk Cho of Mass Studies. The full programme can be viewed on The Met's website.

The symposium is free with museum admission, but advance registration is recommended as space is limited and not guaranteed.

Separate registration is available for the morning and afternoon sessions. For those unable to attend, the talks will be streamed live on Dezeen and The Met's Facebook page.

In Our Time is made possible by Aesop, with support from Daniel Brodsky, Diego Marroquin, Suchi Reddy / Reddymade, Philip Lehman Foundation, Sara Meltzer, and Dr William Pordy.

Main image of OMA's Qatar National Library is by Iwan Baan.

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An ancient Egyptian temple at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art provided the setting for Chanel's latest catwalk show, when the French fashion house debuted a collection featuring glittering tweeds, golden garments and bold jewels.

The catwalk looped The Met's Temple of Dendur – an Ancient Egyptian monument completed in 10BC – to create an appropriate setting for the debut of Chanel's 2018/19 Métiers d'art collection earlier this week.

With a taste for elaborate shows, creative director Karl Lagerfeld chose the decorative sandstone temple to provide the backdrop for the presentation, as well as inform the Egyptian-style aesthetic of the pieces.

"Egyptian civilisation has always fascinated me: I get inspired by an idea, which I make a reality," said Lagerfeld in a project statement.

Floating regal garments, bold geometric prints and lavishly colourful accessories featured throughout the collection, along with plenty of golden garments in sparkling, shimmering and crackled textures.

Beige, white and black tweeds – a Chanel staple – are threaded with mohair, gold and beaded cotton.

"I think the image of this collection is very much down to this refinement which should be seen close up, almost touched, to understand how it is done and to really appreciate the beauty of this work," said Lagerfeld, who also drew on the antiquities for pieces in his first sculptural exhibition.

Other motifs included the Ancient Egyptian scarab beetle, which can be seen a necklace, buttons, belt buckle, earrings and handbags, while the models' makeup resembled the Eye of Horus.

American music producer Pharrell Williams – who is set to collaborate with Chanel – was adorned with the facial marking while modelling baggy gold trousers and a bejewelled jumper.

Other features of this year's garments were intended asa  nod to New York, including street-art-style graphics on printed t-shirts, and a patched denim two-piece worn by model Kaia Gerber. "New York, it's an energy and a melting pot of cultures, it's very stimulating," said Lagerfeld.

The presentation at The Met marks the 17th edition of the annual Métiers d'art showcase, which always takes place in December outside of the seasonal shows. Each year, a different city provides both the setting and the influence, with previous locations including Tokyo, Monte Carlo, London, Moscow and Shanghai.

Chanel produces Métiers d'art to celebrate its collaborations with art houses and manufactures in Europe. Twenty-six makers, which include embroiderers, goldsmiths, pleaters and milliners, form Chanel's Paraffection subsidiary – launched to foster and preserve artisan craft.

"It is made in a very artisanal way in the best sense of the word, because in artisanal, there is art," said Lagerfeld. "The art of doing it well. An applied art. And it really is astounding," said Lagerfeld,

Making the most of this craft, a number of designs were detailed to take on the guise of exotic animal skins, including a resin plastron, and glass casts and golden leaves that look like the skin of a crocodile – following the news that the house plans to ditch the controversial material.

Chanel, which was founded by fashion designer Coco Chanel in 1909, has become known for it elaborate catwalk sets directed by industry icon Lagerfeld. For example, the brand has previously turned the historic Grand Palais in Paris into a data centre, featuring models dressed as robots.

The showcase at The Met is particularly monumental, as it is only the second fashion brand to host a show at the museum, following Valentino in 1982.

However, the institution is closely aligned with the fashion world, hosting the annual The Met Gala as a highlight of the industry's calendar. Officially known as the Costume Institute Benefit, the themed event aligns with the major fashion exhibit that the Fifth Avenue museum opens each spring.

Last year's Heavenly Bodies exhibition praised fashion and Catholicism, while the has revealed that next year it will explore the ostentatious and humorous aesthetic of "camp".

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Thai architect Kulapat Yantrasast was recently chosen to oversee a major renovation of galleries at The Met in New York. In this exclusive interview, he explains why he designs art spaces to be more than white boxes, and credits mentor Tadao Ando for providing a "true education".

Yantrasast, who runs architecture firm wHY, has gained a reputation for creating major arts spaces in the US – with a portfolio that includes galleries at the Art Institute of Chicago, and the David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles.

This experience made him an obvious for the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art project. But Yantrasast believes his ability to create spaces that are unique to the works on show – rather than plain blank backdrops – was key to his appointment.

"I really see myself as a matchmaker between art and people," the Los Angeles-based architect told Dezeen.

"I want to create space that is not a white box. It's a space that lets the art breathe, [gives] a sense of where you are, a sense of place, whether it's the art, or the context of the city, it's a part of your experience."

Yantrasast's design will "respect and enhance" historic Met

The $70 million (£54 million) project at The Met will involve transforming the Micheal C Rockefeller Wing, where it hosts its Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas (AAOA) department.

In Yantrasast's redesign, each region will have a dedicated space featuring architectural details based on the different vernaculars, also intended to complement the existing Fifth Avenue building.

"The relationship from floor, to wall, to ceiling in the new Rockefeller Wing respects and enhances the parti of the spatial organisation seen in the historic spaces of The Met, but integrates the sense of place of the collection's three regions," he said.

Another example of Yantrasast's anti-white box approach is his recent transformation of a 19th-century building in New York's Tribeca neighbourhood into a space for design gallery R & Company.

"It's definitely not a white box, it's more like a museum," said the architect, who spoke with Dezeen both before and after the news of The Met appointment.

The David Kordansky Gallery, which the firm completed in 2014, is also a "standout" project for the architect, alongside his other West Coast commissions.

These include the "elegant and accessible" Christie's Auction house in Beverly Hills, the Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and the Marciano Art Foundation of Los Angeles – for which he converted an abandoned temple.

Working with Tadao Ando was Yantrasast's "true education"

Born in Bangkok, Thailand, Yantrasast first gained a degree at the country's Chulalongkorn University. He then moved to Tokyo aged 20 to complete a masters and PHD in architecture.

But he credits the eight years spent working with renowned Japanese architect Tadao Ando as his most valuable training.

"It was a true education, not only in architecture but in philosophy, for how you project philosophy to your work, and how you live your life," he said. "All of that is very much what I learned from him."

The architect worked on a number of large projects at Ando's firm, including museums and galleries like the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas.

"We had a very close relationship, travelled together all the time," Yantrasast added. "I was a very big part of that brand for a long time, working in the background."

While remaining close friends, Yantrasast branched out from Ando and moved to America, where he set up wHY in 2003. He said he was on the hunt for new challenges.

"In Japan, I felt everyone is looking the same, dressing the same way, consuming the same media, everything was in this designed rarefied world," Yantrasast said.

"My Thai roots started to come in," he continued. "I wanted diversity, I wanted smells, I wanted all of that so I came to America for that reason."

Read on for an edited transcript from our interviews with Yantrasast:

Eleanor Gibson: Why do you think that you were selected for The Met project?

Kulapat Yantrasast: The team at The Met visited our previous works at the Harvard Art Museums and at the Art Institute of Chicago; I believe something must have spoken to them about the clean-line aesthetic, focus on the collection, and its installation.

Our design for both projects utilises casework that is easy to operate, while showcasing the art objects in their best presence.

Eleanor Gibson: What is the concept for Africa, Oceania and the Americas galleries design? Are there any details you can reveal?

Kulapat Yantrasast: The concept is to create clear and distinctive portals and presence for the three regions of the wing: arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas. These areas altogether cover more than three quarters of the world, yet there is not sufficient distinction given to them in most museum presentations. In the new design, each region has its own access portal and its own sense of place – inspired by an architectural impression of the region, as well as strong visual connection to other regions and other collections at The Met.

It is a personal joy to work with great artists and curators

Eleanor Gibson: How does it reference The Met building?

Kulapat Yantrasast: The architecture of The Met's historic, and multiple, generations of architecture were taken into consideration. From the dome of the Great Hall to the vault ceiling of the Greek and Roman Galleries. The relationship from floor, to wall, to ceiling in the new Rockefeller Wing respects and enhances the parti of the spatial organisation seen in the historic spaces of the Met, but integrates the sense of place of the collection's three regions.

Eleanor Gibson: You've completed a number of galleries and arts spaces, why do you choose to work in this field?

Kulapat Yantrasast: I love art and I love discoveries. Art is one of a few things left that truly allows us to see the world in a new way every time we encounter a new artwork, a new concept. It is a personal joy to work with great artists and curators, beyond being a lifelong passion and lesson for me.

Eleanor Gibson: Have there been any highlights from other galleries you've designed?

Kulapat Yantrasast: I think the David Kordansky Gallery in LA. The programme is very strong and the building really supported the programme, so it's a good synergetic relationship to the architecture and the art programme there. That has stood out for most people.

We have since designed buildings for Christie's Auction house in Beverly Hills, which is more elegant and accessible, and people love the building too.

Two recent projects we did are the Marciano Art Foundation in Los Angeles, and that's the conversion of an old Masonic Temple – 120,000 square feet into the art, and the element of play between all of these is really quite successful for me, and the spaces are nice.

Then we finished the Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, which opened last September.

The white box has reached its peak

Eleanor Gibson: What have been your key takeaways from these projects?

Kulapat Yantrasast: I really see myself as a matchmaker between art and people. I want to create space that is not a white box, it's a space that lets the art breath, a sense of where you are, a sense of place, whether it's the art, or the context of the city, it's a part of your experience. At the same time I want to make sure that we have wonderful and good times, the art looks good, people feel comfortable and feel in a good space.

I feel that the white box has reached its peak. And even before, the limitations of isolating art from life and art from context, which becomes a problem in understanding art. So yes in general when I do art spaces I try to not stop life from happening.

Eleanor Gibson: You spent some time working with Tadao Ando, could you tell me about that?

Kulapat Yantrasast: Yes thank you. I was born in Thailand, and moved to Japan when I was 20. Eight years of that was with Ando as my mentor. Before that ,I finished a masters and pHD programme in architecture, and then I met Ando so I went to work with him for eight years.

It was a true education, not only in architecture but in philosophy, for how you project philosophy to your work, and how you live your life, all of that is very much what I learned from him. We had a very close relationship, travelled together all the time, I lived very close to him, so we had the full on mentoring that I received.

For Ando it's really about a clarity of thought

Eleanor Gibson: What do you still refer back to from that time?

Kulapat Yantrasast: I think for Ando it's really about a clarity of thought. A big aspect of his work is the clarity of the structure, the parti diagram that's very important, and how in a way his architecture is an abstraction of culture, interact with nature, whether it's nature in the greenery of water, nature in the light and air, I think is the quality that really attracted me to it.

I was also a very big part of that brand for a long time, working in the background. And then I felt it's great but I need something else, which is when I decided to move from Japan to America.

Eleanor Gibson: How was that transition?

Kulapat Yantrasast: It wasn't difficult, there were just more surprises than I thought.

When I was working with with Ando from 1996-2003, I used to come to America 10 times a year. So I felt exposed to the city and to the people here, part of the reason I moved to America was because of the diversity. In Japan, I felt everyone is looking the same, dressing the same way, consuming the same media, everything was in this designed rarefied world.

My Thai roots started to come in. I wanted diversity, I wanted smells, I wanted all of that so I came to America for that reason.

When I actually lived here, I realised that those diversities and varieties come with lessons that you need to be able to overcome, they are anything from politics, to agenda, to egos, they come with diversity. In order to overcome is much more difficult than to create a unity out of similarities. To get a unity out of diversity is so complex and so difficult, but I've felt that the way the world is moving towards, I was curious about it. It took me a longer time than I thought to understand what it was about and to incorporate that kind of diversity.

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New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art has selected Thai architect Kulapat Yantrasast of wHY to design a major overhaul of its wing for arts produced in Africa, Oceania and the Americas.

The Met revealed plans today for the $70 million (£54 million) transformation of the Micheal C Rockefeller Wing, where it hosts its Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas (AAOA) department.

Yantrasast, who runs New York architecture firm wHy, will update the galleries in the 40,000-square-foot wing on the southern side of the Fifth Avenue museum. The aim is to better showcase the collection of arts and artefacts created in sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific Islands, and North, Central and South America.

The Met selects Yantrasast's "extraordinary design"

"Within AAOA alone there is the potential for highlighting parallels and contrasts that consider how societies across hundreds of cultures, five continents, and 5,000 years have addressed issues of authorship, patronage, trade, governance, state ideology, and ancestral commemoration," said Met director Max Hollein in a statement.

"This major reinstallation of a core part of The Met's global collection and the extraordinary design by Kulapat Yantrasast will be a manifestation of our ability to further advance the understanding, appreciation and contextualisation of the world's most significant cultures."

Comprising 11,000 works across various disciplines and dating as far back as 3,000 BC, the AAOA collection was started in 1893 when The Met was gifted Mexican stone sculpture and Peruvian ceramics.

However, the department only truly came to fruition in 1969, after philanthropist and former US vice president Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller donated his fine-arts survey of non-Western art traditions. The collection, which included African and Oceanic works that were not yet represented in the museum, marked the start of the new wing.

Named after Rockefeller's son, anthropologist Michael C Rockefeller, the department has since tripled in size due to other gifts.

Gallery design to evoke "architectural vernaculars" of regions

The galleries – which are currently organised geographically – will be reimagined in the update to draw on the architectural traits of the regions, according to AAOA curator Alisa LaGamm.

"Our thinking for the new galleries centres on the importance of reframing each of the specific regions of the world represented," she said.

"We will be seeking to illuminate their artistic brilliance by invoking a sense of place through referencing architectural vernaculars relevant to each segment, while also tethering these aspects to historical movements."

Few details of Yantrasast's design have been revealed so far, apart from a series of renderings. These show a curved, white ribbed ceiling covering gallery spaces and stone-like partitions to showcase artworks.

There will be plenty of open space for the display of large statues, while a slanted glass wall will also be maintained.

Renovation will be "timely civic contribution" to New York City

Daniel H Weiss, president of the New York City museum, described the project as an initiative to adequately represent the heritage of the local population in its collections.

"Its expansive and diverse character uniquely resonates with our global city," he said. "Our Africa and Americas collections alone represent the heritage of a quarter of the US population and half of New York City's residents."

"The renovation of this suite of galleries will at once make a unique and timely civic contribution to our community and immeasurably enrich and deepen appreciation of a vast swath of the world's artistic dynamism," Weiss added.

The Met is slated to begin the Rockefeller Wing renovation in late 2020, with completion expected in the following year. The project forms part of wider improvement plans across the museum, including the renovation of the British decorative arts and sculpture galleries, the Modern Wing, and updates to the European Paintings galleries.

Earlier this year, the museum also announced that it will vacate its Marcel Breuer-designed building, providing a temporary home for the Frick collection during renovation work. This move sparked suggestions that The Met will revive its plans for a David Chipperfield-designed extension.

Yantrasast – who was mentored by Tadao Ando – has a growing portfolio of major arts and cultural projects, including a new building for the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth with the Japanese architect.

With his firm wHY, which he founded in 2003, he has also worked on the Michigan's Grand Rapids Art Museum, exhibition spaces at the Art Institute of Chicago, and a new gallery for R & Company in Manhattan's TriBeCa neighbourhood.

Renderings are by wHY.

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New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art has revealed that its major fashion exhibition next year will explore the ostentatious and humorous aesthetic of "camp".

The Costume Institute's Spring 2019 show will be titled Camp: Notes on Fashion – a take on the name of a 1964 essay by American writer Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp.

The essay will provide the "framework" for the exhibition, which will trace the origins and evolution of camp from the 17th century to today.

"Fashion is the most overt and enduring conduit of the camp aesthetic," said the institute's lead curator Andrew Bolton in a statement. "Effectively illustrating Sontag's Notes on 'Camp', the exhibition will advance creative and critical dialogue about the ongoing and ever-evolving impact of camp on fashion."

Around 175 items will be displayed, with womenswear and menswear presented alongside drawings, paintings and sculpture in the Iris and B Gerald Cantor Exhibition Hall at The Met's Fifth Avenue location.

The exhibition will begin with a focus on the concept of se camper – "to posture boldly" – in the royal courts of Louis XIV and Louis XV at Versailles.

Camp's expression through figures known as dandies, and its development in queer subcultures across Europe and America, will then be investigated.

The largest section will be dedicated to how the elements of the aesthetic described by Sontag – like irony, humour, parody, pastiche, artifice, theatricality, and exaggeration – are communicated through fashion.

"Camp's disruptive nature and subversion of modern aesthetic values has often been trivialised, but this exhibition will reveal its profound influence on both high art and popular culture," said Met director Max Hollein.

"By tracing its evolution and highlighting its defining elements, the show will embody the ironic sensibilities of this audacious style, challenge conventional understandings of beauty and taste, and establish the critical role this important genre has played in the history of art and fashion."

Camp: Notes on Fashion, supported by Italian fashion house Gucci and media group Condé Nast, will open to the public 9 May 2019 and run until 8 September 2019.

The annual Costume Institute Benefit, also known as the Met Gala, will take place on 6 May 2019. Considered a highlight of the fashion calendar, the event will be co-chaired by American Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour and Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele, along with celebrities Lady Gaga, Harry Styles and Serena Williams.

The Met's Spring 2018 fashion exhibition, which drew connections between Catholicism and contemporary couture, closed earlier this month after breaking the museum's attendance record.

Photography is by Johnny Dufort.

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New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art intends to vacate its Marcel Breuer-designed building, giving the Frick Collection a home during its controversial overhaul, and revive its plans for David Chipperfield's extension to its Fifth Avenue location.

The Met is planning to transfer its Met Breuer programme back to Fifth Avenue in 2020, allowing the Frick to temporarily move in when the major renovation work commences on its historic Upper East Side building, just blocks away.

The move would enable the Frick to keep its collections, exhibitions, library resources, and education programmes open to the public during the overhaul. It is unclear what will happen to the Breuer building after the Frick moves out.

"The Frick has been exploring ways to ensure that our visitors can continue to enjoy our collections and have access to our library resources and education programmes, as we look forward to the renovation of our home," said the art museum's Ian Wardropper.

"Collaborating with The Met on a temporary initiative at the Breuer building would enable us to do just that, a mere five blocks away, during a time when the Frick would otherwise need to be closed completely to the public."

The Met took over and renovated Hungarian architect Breuer's landmark concrete and granite building to create a satellite location for contemporary and modern art.

Met "to reengage" with Chipperfield's scrapped extension

It moved in two years ago, after plans were revealed to construct a new wing for contemporary art at the Fifth Avenue site six blocks away.

British architect Chipperfield was chosen to design the extension in 2015, but the project was halted two years later due to cutbacks, the Architect's Newspaper reported. The Met now plans to revive the scheme as part of a strategy to consolidate its programming.

"Two years ago the prudent course was to prioritise our large capital projects – enabling us to begin the long overdue replacement of skylights for the European Paintings galleries – and to build a financial path toward a balanced budget," said The Met's Daniel H Weiss in a statement.

"With this critical work well on its way, and [Met director] Max Hollein's arrival, we are now ready to reengage with architect David Chipperfield's plan for expanded and improved Modern and Contemporary galleries."

Museums help to preserve city's important modernist architecture

The Breuer building switch follows a similar exchange in 2016, when The Met took over the brutalist structure from original occupant, the Whitney Museum, which left for its new Renzo Piano-designed home in the Meatpacking District.

Orchestrated by art collector Leonard Lauder, the transition was commended by Alan Brake in an Opinion column for Dezeen for giving the city a "major new museum almost overnight" and saving an important mid-century building.

The Met's in-house design team worked with local firm Beyer Blinder Belle on a series of subtle renovations to reconfigure the interiors of the Breuer structure ahead of its reopening in 2016.

Frick exchange follows renovation controversy

The deal with the Frick follows controversy surrounding its Selldorf Architects-designed renovation and expansion, which has received opposition from preservationists since it was unveiled in April 2018.

The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission approved the scheme two months later, despite major protests against the "harmful" plans to alter the original Russell Page design.

A previous proposed extension by Davis Brody Bond was abandoned in 2015 after artists protested against the plans to build on the museum's green space.

Photograph of Met Breuer is by Floto+Warner.

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Ties between fashion and the Catholic church are examined in an exhibition split across two venues of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Organised by the museum's Costume Institute in collaboration with the department of Medieval Art, Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination explores how the religion's imagery and symbolism has impacted contemporary haute-couture and ready-to-wear designs.

"The exhibition situates costumes alongside religious artworks to provide an interpretive context for fashion's engagement in Catholicism," said chief curator Andrew Bolton during a press conference.

"Most of the designers featured in the exhibition were raised Catholic," he continued. "While many of them no longer practice, their relationships to Catholicism vary considerably. Most acknowledge its significant influence over their imaginations."

Visitors are invited to make a "pilgrimage" through various sections of the Fifth Avenue building, before travelling to The Met Cloisters at Manhattan's northern tip for the second part.

The two locations cover different themes relating to the overall title, across a total of 25 galleries and 60,000 square feet (5,570 square metres) of exhibition space designed by New York architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

At Fifth Avenue, spread through the Byzantine and Medieval galleries, the garments and ensembles on show represent the opulence and "pageantry" often associated with Catholicism.

Extravagant pieces by famed designers like Alexander McQueen, Yves Saint Laurent, Jean Paul Gaultier and John Galliano were chosen for their visual connections to "the cults of saints, angels and the Virgin Mary".

Arranged in a row are a series of contemporary designs based on the cassock – a full-length garment typically worn by male members of the clergy – while a line-up of mannequins opposite display various interpretations of the traditional nun's habit.

A cast a colourfully dressed characters, arranged to look like angels found in the paintings by early renaissance Italian artist Fra Angelico, can be found in the Lehman Wing.

In the Anna Wintour Costume Center is a collection of over 40 papal robes and attire borrowed from The Vatican archives and Sistine Chapel Sacristy, dating from the mid-18th to early 21st century. The delicately embroidered garments and intricately decorated crowns, tiaras and other jewellery are the first pieces from the historic collection to be displayed at The Met since 1983 – and some have never been seen outside The Vatican before.

Meanwhile uptown, the Cloisters – a collection of French monasteries rebuilt together in Fort Tyron park – displays items influenced by the more contemplative aspects of the religion.

"These spaces provide the conceptual framework for fashions inspired by monastic orders," said Bolton. "The designers featured are well known for their minimalist sensibilities and monochromatic colour palettes." These include Rick Owens and Gareth Pugh.

The most dramatic displays at this location are two wedding ensembles placed at separate altar spaces within the complex – one by late Spanish designer Cristobal Balenciaga – and a pair of Valentino outfits presented on high podiums in one of the courtyard spaces.

Another room features representations of the garden of eden, including a set of garments by Japanese brand Undercover printed with detailed scenes from a triptych of paintings titled The Garden of Earthly Delights by 15th- and 16th-century Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch.

"Taken together, the fashions and artworks in Heavenly Bodies sing in unison with enchanted and enchanting voices," Bolton said.

The Costume Institute organises a spring exhibition each year, the opening of which on the first Monday in May is accompanied by The Met Gala – one of the most eagerly anticipated events in the annual fashion calendar.

Previous editions have included a retrospective of work by Comme des Garcons founder Rei Kuwakabo, an examination of the relationship between handcraft and machine production, and an exploration of China's influence on designers over the years.

Heavenly Bodies opens to the public from 10 May 2018 and runs until 8 October 2018.

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Dezeen livestreamed a series of architecture talks and discussions at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, which featured presentations by architects including Wang Shu, David Adjaye, Amanda Levete and Elizabeth Diller.

The livestream has now ended, but you can still watch the full day of talks. The first part of the symposium is embedded at the top of this story, while the second part can be watched below.

Dezeen was media partner for In Our Time: A Year of Architecture in a Day, which The Met hosted for the second year running in the museum's Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium.

The symposium brought together architects, artists, curators and filmmakers from around the world, each selected to present a project that has had a particular impact this year.

Our livestream will be split into two parts to coincide with the programme for the day, which can be seen in full on The Met's website.

The first part of the livestream featured a keynote presentation by Pritzker Prize-winning Chinese architect Wang Shu about his Fuyang Cultural Complex in China, as well as a series of fast-paced talks about the year's key buildings and projects, by architects including David Adjaye and Shih-Fu Peng.

Artist Lucy McRae screened her short film The Institute of Isolation, a fictional examination of the ways travellers to outer space could use architecture and design to train their bodies for the challenge.

During the second part of the livestream, The Met's associate curator of architecture and design, Beatrice Galilee – who organised the programme – took part in a conversation with a creative leader at IKEA.

There was also a panel discussion titled In Our Future: Radical Design Education, which was moderated by the museum's chair of education, Sandra Jackson-Dumont.

More short architecture presentations from figures including Amanda Levete, Elizabeth Diller, Junya Ishigami and Iwan Baan were held before artist John Gerrard discussed his work Western Flag, a simulated flag of black smoke.

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Dezeen promotion: a symposium covering the most important architecture and design projects from the past 12 months will take place 9 December 2017 at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, with speakers including architects Wang Shu and David Adjaye.

As media partner for In Our Time: A Year of Architecture in a Day, which The Met is hosting for the second year running, Dezeen will be live-streaming the full series of talks.

The symposium – from 11am to 6pm at the museum's Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium – will bring together architects, artists, curators and filmmakers from around the world, each selected to present a project that has had a particular impact this year.

"The speakers were selected to represent the incredible range of contemporary architectural practice now taking place all over the world," said a statement from The Met.

"They will illuminate the creative process behind newly built homes and institutions, advancements in new technologies, and areas that have been greatly affected by climate change and natural and man-made disasters."

A keynote presentation will be delivered by Pritzker Prize-winning Chinese architect Wang Shu, who will speak about his Fuyang Cultural Complex in China.

The Met's associate curator of architecture and design, Beatrice Galilee – who organised the programme – will be in conversation with a creative leader at IKEA, and a panel discussion titled In Our Future: Radical Design Education will be moderated by the museum's chair of education, Sandra Jackson-Dumont.

The remainder of the afternoon will be filled with fast-paced presentations about the year's key buildings and projects. David Adjaye will speak about his National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC, and Amanda Levete will discuss her new entrance and exhibition hall for London's V&A museum.

The themes and exhibitions of the second Chicago Architecture Biennial will be explained by the event's artistic directors Johnston Marklee, and the new medical building at Columbia University will be presented by Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

Artists and designers participating will include John Gerrard, who simulated a flag of black smoke as a symbol of climate change; Nelly Ben Hayoun, who set up the fee-free University of the Underground design course; and Lucy McRae, who fictionally examined the ways space travellers could use architecture and design to train their bodies.

Ethiopian artist Julie Mehretu will speak about her Politicized Landscapes pair of large-scale, site-specific artworks for the atrium of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Projects that examine the roles of dating apps and virtual reality in cities, and Syria's architectural history and future, will also feature.

The talks are free to attend with museum admission. Registration is recommended, but space is limited and will be available on a first-come, first-served basis. Doors will open at 10:30am.

For those unable to make it, both Dezeen and The Met will be live-streaming on Facebook. A link to the stream will be provided on the Dezeen homepage on the day.

To find out more about the In Our Time programme and see the full list of speakers, visit The Met's website.

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New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art will draw connections between religious art and contemporary couture for its next major fashion exhibition, to be designed by architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination will be a joint between The Met's Fifth Avenue location and The Met Cloisters – the museum's satellite location at the northern tip of Manhattan, which exhibits medieval art.

The exhibition will trace the history of garments depicted in Catholic art, and reveal how some of today's biggest designers have been influenced by the imagery and ideas presented in centuries of ecclesiastical artefacts.

The Costume Institute, based at the museum, is partnering with The Met's Department of Medieval Art to organise the show.

"Fashion and religion have long been intertwined, mutually inspiring and informing one another," said Costume Institute curator Andrew Bolton. "Although this relationship has been complex and sometimes contested, it has produced some of the most inventive and innovative creations in the history of fashion."

For the show, a collection of papal robes and accessories will travel from The Vatican for display in the Anna Wintour Costume Center. The garments, rings and tiaras date from the 18th to early 20th century – spanning 15 papacies – and will be shown alongside 50 artworks from the sacristy of the Sistine Chapel.

In The Met's medieval galleries and at The Met Cloisters, 150 ensembles from the past century will be presented among the historic artworks. Outfits by names including Azzedine Alaïa, Cristobal Balenciaga, John Galliano, Jean Paul Gaultier, Karl Lagerfeld, Raf Simons and Vivienne Westwood will all feature.

New York-based Diller Scofidio + Renfro will collaborate with the museum's design department on the exhibition display, following the firm's work on the institution's Charles James exhibition in 2014.

Heavenly Bodies will run from 10 May to 8 October 2018. The opening will follow the annual Met Gala fundraiser, which has become one of the most eagerly anticipated events on the fashion calendar.

Last year's spring exhibition was dedicated to the work of Comme des Garcons founder Rei Kawakubo, while the previous two shows have focussed on the relationship between fashion and technology, and the industry's obsession with Chinese art and design.

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The Met's Comme des Garçons exhibition demonstrates how forward-thinking designers like Rei Kawakubo are using new digital crafts to manipulate both the body and architectural space, says Aaron Betsky in his latest Opinion column.

There is a mix of architecture and fashion in the exhibition of Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo's work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Not only is Kawakubo, who founded and runs the label Comme des Garçons, an architect of clothes, creating structures and shapes the body occupies as an independent entity, but she also designed the display.

A collection of compound curves carried out in white that plays call and response with the displays, the design is as idiosyncratic in its relation to what it houses as Kawakubo's clothes are by design. The exhibition reminded me of the ways in which fashion and architecture are increasingly becoming intertwined as they figure out how to make sense of the world in which they operate.

This is not just a question of architecture becoming more fashion-oriented. Yes, it is becoming more ephemeral, image-oriented, and subject to the cycles of fashion, including its continual references to classic periods (classical, baroque, rococo, neo-classical) and its appropriation of previously outré form for use by the elite.

But, in addition, technology, craft, and fluidity of form are causing the opposition between things we wear and things that shelter us to dissolve in favour of structuring both individual and social persona.

Technology, craft, and fluidity of form are causing the opposition between things we wear and things that shelter us to dissolve

The dissolution of the frozen forms of building into more fluid shapes due to the use of computer technology by the UNStudios of this world, the assimilation of popular culture elements onto facades and even into the fabric of buildings by the likes of OMA and its spawn, and the reemergence of the idea of architecture as something based on the history of tents and textiles have all softened the edges of architecture.

Meanwhile, the attention paid to various ways buildings can respond to the human body, first crudely through "human factors engineering" and its even more scientifically dubious cousin, "evidence-based design", and now through the rehabilitation of James J Gibson's notions of affordance by firms as diverse as Zaha Hadid Architects, RAAAF of the Netherlands, and Snøhetta, is also blurring the boundaries between adoptive responses to the body and the frameworks of architecture.

Finally, the popularity of the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk's notions of "bubbles", "foams", or "spheres" has led inquiring architects to find communality between the enclosures they propose and the swaddling surroundings of clothes.

At the same time, fashion designers have looked for inspiration to architecture. Minimalist designers from Pierre Cardin to Ralph Lauren and Tom Ford have proclaimed their love for a stripped-down version of modernism, seeking to abstract the body into floating planes and uniforms that show us as parts of a larger machinery – though some with more means float above it in a white blouse or the perfect black dress.

Designers such as Hussein Chalayan have gone further, imagining their couture as becoming furniture or integrating their designs into environmental manipulations of spaces. A few architects, such as Nigel Coates, have also moved into the design of objects that are hybrids between buildings and objects of fashion.

Throughout this period, some fashion designers have stuck to the traditions and skills of their discipline, finding ways to not so much blur the boundaries, as to understand that similar issues – shelter and comfort, function and form, beauty and delight – animate both architecture and fashion.

Their revival of past types, from bustiers to layered dresses, historical patterns they sometimes found at old textile mills, and the crafts associated with them, most eminently by the likes of Vivienne Westwood, but also in the work of Parisian couturiers such as Jean-Paul Gautier, has paralleled the revaluation of ancient crafts and historical types in architecture (as it has, of course, in everything from literature to music). The result has been neither mimicry not integration, but an echoing of concerns and styles.

In my mind, Kawakubo's work epitomises the latter approach. Starting in the late 1990s, she developed forms that bulged, billowed, and squeezed out of the body, adding appendages and fabric prosthetics that had little seeming relations to the body its clothing.

Though she referred to deformities the body might have – such as hunchbacks and tumours – in describing the Body Meets Dress/Dress Meets Body line (1997), over time it became clear that what she had in mind was an exploration of the sculptural and spatial potential inherent in couture.

Kawakubo's work epitomises an echoing of concerns and styles

If traditional fashion used knowledge developed over centuries of cutting, shaping, and sewing to fit the body – containing it, cushioning it, emphasising its best features and hiding others – she used the same craft to create forms that were wholly independent and often in contrast to the human form.

At times, as when she turned a man's double-breasted, Prince of Wales-checked suit into the site for arms fit for the Michelin man (The Infinity of Tailoring, 2013), extra sails of cloth unfurling from underneath the lapels, and cut-off, wide pants (Persona, 2006-7), the shapes had the effect of either emphasising or satirising the power these suits were meant to express.

At other times, they picked up on the tradition of turning the body into an abstract object of a larger scale, an effect Kawakubo achieved with hoop skirts, bodices, hats, and other structural extensions or additions (Ceremony of Separation, 2016). She also either abstracted them or turned them into hybrid characters in which the large skirts turn into masses of intertwined tentacles (Not Making Clothing, 2014).

The effect of all this work was to make her creations have an active and critical relation with the person wearing them, in terms of both her or his personality and body. Who you are and how you appear, Kawakubo showed, could be something flexible and designed. Fashion could have the same ability to frame and deform your public appearance and your personal sense of comfort that architecture long claimed.

Just as a house could be a large and abstract version of how you saw yourself, or how you fitted into society, and just as an office building could both fit and extend corporate power, so fashion could make the human body into the beginning point, not the end, of who we are and how we appear.

Kawakubo's other technique, that of tearing apart her dresses into strips and collaging together to form incomplete costumes, made her fashion into a form of quotation as flexible and full of blurred edges as the flow of images that surrounds us and appears continually on our screens (Inside Decoration, 2011).

Who you are and how you appear could be something flexible and designed

We observe our reality in such smears of colour and form, in which time and space matter less than the strength of something we see out of the corner of our eye, and Kawakubo entered into the imagosphere with abandon, while trailing the history of couture so that she could make that floating world her own.

All this appears at the Metropolitan Museum exhibition in architecture that is equally distended and distorted. The costumes stand in alcoves that are combinations of half- and three-quarter-circles, in cut-off squares, in cylinders, or cantilevered display boxes.

You wander through these cast-offs from a search for ideal architecture without any clear path. The unglazed vitrines recall buildings while sheltering and framing their subjects, but they do not seem to have a logical relation with either the fashion or the viewers.

The whole assembly sits under the glare of fluorescent tubes, with no attempt to spotlight any of the fashion's fine points. Kawakubo's architecture is as much a play of fragments cutting apart our sense of definition and certainty as her clothing designs are.

I came away from the Rei Kawakubo exhibition with the sense that there is, in fact, no fixed point of reference for any of those arts that mirror, map, or frame our world. Both the body with its fixed proportions and functions, and the single perspective and point of view we gain from that corporeal container, are supposed facts we can manipulate.

The context is what we make it. Craft can defy gravity as well as function. Image can become form and vice versa, but never completely. These are the new rules of design in architecture, in art, and in fashion.

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The sculptural clothes of enigmatic Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo are the subject of this year's spring exhibition organised by the Costume Institute at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between is the museum's first monographic exhibition on a living designer since Yves Saint Laurent in 1983.

It includes over 150 garments – designed between the 1980s and now – that demonstrate her avant-garde ideas, her attitude towards fashion as an extension of the body, and her impact on the industry.

"Season after season, collection after collection, she upends conventional notions of beauty and disrupts accepted characteristics of the fashionable body," said curator Andrew Bolton.

"Her fashions not only stand apart from the genealogy of clothing but also resist definition and confound interpretation."

The exhibition is spilt into nine themes that each examine a duality found in Kawakubo's designs, which lie somewhere between art and clothing.

They are titled Absence/Presence, Design/Not Design, Fashion/Antifashion, Model/Multiple, High/Low, Then/Now, Self/Other, Object/Subject, and Clothes/Not Clothes, some of which are also divided into a number of sub-categories.

Sections include examples of Kawakubo's interpretations of the Japanese concept of "kawaii" – or cuteness – her blurring of clothes for weddings and funerals, and fusion of conventionally male and female apparel.

The garments, many of which have wildly exaggerated silhouettes, are also grouped by colour rather than age to further emphasise the connections across her catalogue of work.

"Kawakubo's art of the 'in-between' generates meaningful mediations and connections as well as revolutionary innovations and transformations, offering endless possibilities for creation and re-creation," Bolton said.

Since Kawakubo started her Comme des Garçons label in Tokyo in 1969, she has been reluctant to explain her work and remains elusive to this day.

She also set up the Dover Street Market stores, which sell clothing and accessories by Comme des Garçons and a curated selection of other innovative designers in London, New York and Tokyo.

Installations used to display the garments in these shops are regularly updated and overhauled, creating bespoke environments that relate directly to the clothes.

The Met exhibition design was a collaboration between Kawakubo and the museum's in-house team. The clothes are presented in and around a series of simple white volumes that vary in size and shape – many of which are open circles in plan.

Bolton chose not to include texts beside the outfits so as not to detract from the designs – visitors can find out more in an accompanying booklet should they chose.

Also, rather than using spotlights to highlight the garments, a lattice of fluorescent tubes across the ceiling creates a uniform light across the gallery.

The exhibition opens to the public on Thursday 4 May 2017 and continues until 4 September 2017. Last year's show, Manus x Machina, focussed on the relationship between the handmade and machine-made, while the theme the year before highlighted fashion's obsession with Chinese arts and design.

Gallery photographs are courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Catalogue images are by Paolo Roversi.

Exhibition credits:

Curation: Andrew Bolton
Lighting: Thierry Dreyfus from the Eyesight Group
Heads and wigs: Julien d'Ys

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Argentinian artist Adrián Villar Rojas has created a plaster-cast dinner party on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, featuring characters and objects brought together from across the museum's vast collection.

The Theater of Disappearance was created for The Met's annual Roof Garden Commission.

It includes replicas of over 100 historic and contemporary items, which have been 3D scanned and digitally composed together.

The pieces were arranged in, around and on top of each other to form hybrid interpretations of the artefacts, then either CNC milled or 3D printed.

The entire installation is coated in automotive paint to ensure it isn't damaged by inclement weather.

"It's an incredibly elaborate method of production," curator Beatrice Galilee told Dezeen.

Most of the installation revolves around a series of all-white dining tables, arranged in diagonal lines across the museum's Iris and B Gerald Cantor Roof Garden – which boasts panoramic views of Central Park and the Manhattan skyline.

The thick tabletops rest on rows of chairs along either side, although some of the seats are occupied by the sculptures.

Some of the party guests are partially sunk into the table surfaces, while others appear to be interacting with each other.

Smaller objects like tableware from across the Met’s various collections – from Ancient Roman and Greek, to African art – are also scattered across the scene.

Other pieces that stand away from the banquet are picked out in black, but were created in the same way.

Of these, characters from The Kiss sport bunny ears, while the head of an Egyptian dignitary is held up in the air by a young girl.

At the end of the garden, a towering totem thrusts into the sky like the many skyscrapers behind.

The idea for the site-specific installation came from The Met's early history, when plaster casts of masterpieces were shown before the real artefacts were acquired.

Villar Rojas' intention was to question the ideological stance of the museum and how it chooses to present its vast collection.

He went of a scavenger hunt around the museum to pick out the pieces to include, then purposefully jumbled them up to remove any hierarchy and erase classification.

"The Theater of Disappearance seeks to dialogue with the vision and division of The Met's patrimony," said the artist. "An entire cartography of human culture seems to emerge from the museum's wings and rooms."

"Rather than a mirror of facts, the museum becomes a version of them."

The installation is on show at The Met's main Fifth Avenue location from 14 April to 29 October 2017, weather permitting.

Previous commissions for the roof garden have included last year's Psychobarn installation by Cornelia Parker, and Pierre Huyghe's 2015 piece that featured an aquarium of ancient species.

Photography is by Mario Caporali.

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In Our Time: tune in here for the live stream of today's series of architecture talks and discussions at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, which includes presentations by OMA, Diller Scofidio + Renfro and many more.

The live stream via Facebook will begin at 10:30am New York time (3:30pm UK time) and continues until 6pm. If you can't see the video here, head over to Dezeen's Facebook page.

If you missed the first part of the live stream, you can watch it above

Dezeen is media partner for the In Our Time: A Year of Architecture in a Day symposium, which is taking place all day today at The Met Fifth Avenue's Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium.

The series of talks and discussions was organised by the museum's Daniel Brodsky associate curator of architecture and design, Beatrice Galilee, and will be devoted to the most exciting and critical design projects of 2016.

The second part of the event can be seen above

Our live stream will be spilt into three parts, coinciding with the programme for the day, which also includes talks by Wolfgang Tillmans, West 8, Nelly Ben Hayoun and Smiljan Radić amongst others.

A movie tribute to the late Zaha Hadid produced by Dezeen and Architizer will be screened as part of the event as well.

Part three is also available to watch above

See the full programme for In Our Time: A Year of Architecture in a Day ›

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In Our Time: Dezeen has teamed up with New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art for a day of architecture talks and discussions next month, which will include presentations on robotic furniture by Yves Béhar and the arts centre for Fondazione Prada by OMA.

Dezeen is media partner for the In Our Time: A Year of Architecture in a Day symposium, which will be open to all visitors to The Met Fifth Avenue on Saturday 12 November 2016.

Organised by the museum's Daniel Brodsky associate curator of architecture and design, Beatrice Galilee, the event aims to construct a global view of contemporary architecture.

It will feature discussions led by architects, curators, theorists, photographers and filmmakers on three themes: Architecture on Display, Projects of the Year, and On the Horizon.

Participants will include Istanbul Design Biennial curators Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, Lowline park co-creator Daniel Barasch, and photographer Wolfgang Tillmans – who designed a series of posters opposing Brexit.

Rex Architecture will present its design for the performing arts centre for New York's World Trade Center, while design firm Ensamble Studio will discuss the permanent installations it created for the Tippet Rise Art Center in Montana.

Malkit Shoshan, Ou Ning, Donovan Wylie, West 8, Nelly Ben Hayoun, Jill Magid, Smiljan Radić, nArchitects, Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, Bas Princen, Bêka & Lemoine, Nora Akawi, Miranda July, Amanda Williams, Lacaton et Vassal, Deborah Berke Partners, and Christ & Gantenbein will also discuss projects.

A series of architecture and design films, including Stefan Sagmeister's The Happy Film, will be screened throughout the day alongside the symposium programme.

They will include Dezeen's movie in which leading architects pay tribute to Zaha Hadid, who died earlier this year.

The film created with Architizer features interviews with Norman Foster, Bjarke Ingels, Richard Rogers, Daniel Libeskind and more.

Also during the day, 10-minute Spotlight Gallery Talks on architecture will also take place at The Met Fifth Avenue, The Met Breuer, and The Met Cloisters.

In Our Time: A Year of Architecture in a Day will take place on Saturday 12 November 2016, from 10:30am to 6pm.

The event is free with museum admission and seating is first come, first served. Space is limited.

www.metmuseum.org

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The Shohei Shigematsu-led OMA New York office has used translucent scrim to create a "ghost cathedral" for this year's Costume Institute exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which focuses on the convergence of fashion and technology (+ movie).

Manus x Machina – Fashion in an Age of Technology opens this week in The Met's Robert Lehman Wing, within the temporary space designed by Dutch architecture firm OMA's New York office.

Sponsored by Apple and curated by Andrew Bolton, the exhibition features more than 170 garments that demonstrate ways in which the hand (manus) and machine (machina) are used together to create both haute couture (high fashion) and prêt-à-porter (ready-to-wear) designs.

"Manus x Machina questions the dialectical relationship in which the hand and machine are portrayed as discordant instruments in the production of the haute couture and pret-a-porter," said Bolton.

"Instead of presenting the handmade and the machine made as oppositional, it suggests a spectrum of practice whereby the hand and machine are equal protagonists in solving design problems, enhancing design practices and ultimately advancing the future of fashion."

OMA New York, which Japanese architect Shohei Shigematsu has headed since 2008, has transformed what was previously an underused hallway into the exhibition space using scaffolding wrapped with a white perforated PVC fabric.

"We had to create a whole environment, so what we did was to create this translucent ghost cathedral," Shigematsu told Dezeen.

The classical architectural shapes were designed to be in keeping with the museum's existing architecture, while materials provide a neutral space that would allow visitors to appreciate the details of the intricate garments.

Arranged over two floors, the exhibition showcases examples of 3D printing, laser cutting and other machine-based fabrication combined with work completed by hand.

Upon entering the space on the upper level, visitors are greeted by the 20-foot (six-metre) train of a 2014 wedding ensemble by German designer Karl Lagerfeld. The centrepiece outfit was created using a combination of digital pattern modelling, hand stitching and machine sewing.

Lagerfeld's dress sits beneath OMA's giant central structure, where the golden embroidery patterns are recreated as projections on the dome.

"We always had this concern that fashion exhibitions tend to really rely on flat screens and media, because that's where you see movement," said Shigematsu, whose current projects include a major art museum extension in Quebec. "So we really wanted to integrate the media into the architecture."

Four poches around the outside of the cocoon-like vestibule also feature projections of details from the garments displayed within them, including Yves Saint Laurent's 1958 L'Eléphant Blanc evening dress from his first collection for Dior.

The exhibition is split into six main areas based on sections from 18th-century French philosopher Denis Diderot's Encyclopédie, which categorised art and craft disciplines alongside sciences.

On the upper level, these are broderie (embroidery), plumasserie (featherwork) and parurier floral (artificial flowers).

Along with Lagerfeld's wedding dress and Saint Laurent's L'Eléphant Blanc, embroidery examples include metallic designs by Louis Vuitton from Spring Summer 2016, and a 2012 dress covered in shells and coral by Sarah Burton for Alexander McQueen.

Gareth Pugh's dresses made from straws, Iris van Herpen's bird-like garment fashioned from silicone feathers and Maiko Takeda's bristly headdresses are shown beside more traditional examples of plumasserie by designers including Cristóbal Balenciaga.

Among the floral gowns is Hussein Chalayan's Kaikoku Floating Dress. The remote-controlled fibreglass case is painted gold and hung with crystal and paper "pollens", which release into the air.

Downstairs, galleries are dedicated to maroquinerie (leatherwork), dentellerie (lacework), and plisseé (pleating). Works by Issey Miyake, Comme des Garçons and Junya Watanabe all feature in these spaces.

There's also a room dedicated to tailleur et flou (tailors and dressmakers), in which highlights include a collection of pieces by Chanel.

"Our intention is to liberate the handmade and the machine made from their usual confines of the haute couture and prêt-à-porter, and release them into the hands of fashion designers, to whom they serve as expressions of creative impulses rather than the exigencies of fashion," said Bolton.

Manus x Machina is open to the public from 5 May to 14 August 2016. It is the latest in a series of fashion exhibitions themed around technology, following Techstyle at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Coded Couture at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery.

The Costume Institute's previous spring exhibitions have included the 2015 show highlighting fashion's obsession with Chinese arts and design, and the 2013 display charting punk's influence on haute couture.

Photography is by Brett Beyer, unless otherwise stated.

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British artist Cornelia Parker has created an installation based on the mansion from Alfred Hitchcock's film Psycho for this year's Roof Garden commission at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (+ slideshow).

The site-specific Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) initially appears like a real house, but is actually made up of two facades propped up by scaffolding.

It is located on top of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, also known as The Met, which sits in New York's Central Park.

The domestic style of the false dwelling is intended to contrast with the backdrop of Manhattan's soaring skyscrapers.

"When I saw the roof and the skyline, I knew I wanted to make something architectural," Parker told Dezeen. "I wanted to add something incongruous to the view."

Parker's references for the folly included paintings by US artist Edward Hopper and classic red barns typical of rural America, as well as the sinister mansion from Hitchcock's 1960 thriller.

In the film, the house is home to the family of Norman Bates – a psychotic murderer who lived their with his domineering, deceased mother.

"I read that the Psycho house was based on Hopper's House by the Railroad, so the red barn and the Psycho house became merged," Parker told Dezeen.

"The Psycho house was all about evil and emotional baggage, and the barn is the opposite – it's all about wholesomeness."

She assembled the 30-foot structure with materials from a dismantled red barn in upstate New York, reusing its wooden slats along with dishevelled window frames and corrugated metal roof tiles.

"If you get close to it, you can smell the animals on the wood," said Parker, who often works on large-scale sculptures.

The artist collaborated with New York company Showman, which works on stage sets for films and political TV debates, to build the installation.

The scaffolding poles and water drums hidden behind enable it to withstand 100 mile-per-hour winds.

The Roof Garden Commission: Cornelia Parker, Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) was conceived by The Met's chairman of modern and contemporary art, Sheena Wagstaff, and curated by Beatrice Galilee, in collaboration with Parker.

"For this summer's Roof Garden Commission, Cornelia has developed an astonishing architectural folly," said Wagstaff, "that intertwines a Hitchcock-inspired iconic structure with the materiality of the rural vernacular."

"Combining a deliciously subversive mix of inferences, ranging from innocent domesticity to horror, from the authenticity of landscape to the artifice of a film set, Cornelia's installation expresses perfectly her ability to transform clichés to beguile both eye and mind," she added.

The installation will be on view to the public from 19 April to 31 October 2016.

This is the museum's fourth annual commission for the Iris and B Gerald Cantor Roof Garden, following Pierre Huyghe's 2015 piece that comprised patches of dirt and an aquarium with ancient species.

The Met's 2016 summer programme also includes the Costume Institute's Manus x Machina exhibition, which will open on 5 May 2016 and explore technology's impact on fashion.

Last month, the museum opened The Met Breuer – the renovated Marcel Breuer-designed former home of the Whitney Museum – following the reveal of a controversial new logo earlier this year.

The Met Breuer will temporarily house the museum's contemporary and modern art collection while a David Chipperfield-designed extension is added to the main Fifth Avenue building.

Photography is by Alex Fradkin, unless otherwise stated.

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Opinion: the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art's temporary move in to the Whitney's old unprotected Breuer building is the result of behind-the-scenes machinations of a major donor. Thank goodness, says Alan G Brake.

It might be surprising that one of New York City's best examples of publicly accessible modern architecture could be passed from one museum to another with no public oversight. Thankfully, the puppet master behind such a recent transaction appears to have been motivated by a dedication to both institutions and a love for the building in question, Marcel Breuer's 1966 home for the Whitney Museum of American Art on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

The inverted ziggurat in somber grey granite has been rechristened The Met Breuer as the new home for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's modern and contemporary exhibitions. It as if New Yorkers have a major new museum almost overnight.

The wizard behind the curtain here was Leonard Lauder, the cosmetics magnate and art collector, who brokered the deal between the two museums as the Whitney prepared to move downtown to its new Renzo Piano-designed home, leaving the iconic Breuer edifice hanging in the balance. A major donor to both institutions, Lauder had considerable leverage with the Met – a cache of 81 Picassos, Braques, and Légers that he pledged to the museum.

In the particular ecosystem of New York's prominent cultural institutions, a few dozen wealthy and powerful individuals – usually donors or trustees – often guide priorities and help set agendas, including curatorial and programming practices, and the real estate deals that determine what gets built where.

Often the nature of these transactions is opaque. Arts reporters are dedicated to tracking these institutional players and projects, and watchdogs – including preservationists, cultural critics, and sometimes artists and architects – often bemoan changes to institutions they hold dear, but also routinely accuse of selling-out or betraying their own missions.

At stake in this swap was one of New York's most distinctive buildings, "a piece of sculpture" as Thomas Campbell, director of the Met, called it at the press preview for the Met Breuer. In a city where buildings are shoved cheek to jowl and many present articulated facades to the street and utilitarian side walls of block or brick that assume their neighbours will rise or fall around them, Breuer's Whitney is a building in the round that suggests both a Cyclops and an upside down Mayan ruin.

While the Breuer exterior is inscrutable, the interior is both legible and logical. Unlike Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim, it is also a great place to view art – not too big or too small – it's the perfect place for mid-sized exhibitions, like the Whitney's hit-or-miss but never-to-be-missed biennials. With carefully planned circulation, a clear hierarchy of galleries and unexpected moments of relief, the building repels museum fatigue. Remarkably though, the building is not a city-designated landmark, so it could be torn down if institutional priorities shift.

The Met has leased the Breuer building for eight years as it pursues a renovation and possible expansion of the modern and contemporary wing of its Fifth Avenue home nestled in Central Park. David Chipperfield is heading up that effort, which is sure to draw scrutiny given its location within Manhattan's most iconic leisure ground.

The Met, according to Campbell, has treated the Breuer building "like a work of art under conservation". Architects Beyer Blinder Belle, known for their reverent renovations of Grand Central Terminal and the Empire State Building, polished the floors, oiled the woods, and removed some later accretions like shelving in the lobby. Breuer's original intentions are more alive than ever.

Many expected the Met's curators to be more freewheeling outside their Fifth Avenue headquarters. One preemptive hack job accused the modern and contemporary department of promoting "international biennialism".

But the first shows at the Met Breuer feel both confident and conservative, and very much within the traditions of the Metropolitan. A monographic exhibition of the late Indian Modernist Nasreen Mohamedi, her first in the US, accompanies a blockbuster show, Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible, that examines how and when a work of art is completed. While Edward Hopper and Georgia O'Keefe often ruled the walls at the Whitney, the Met has brought in the big guns of the Western cannon from Rembrandt to Rauschenberg. The Met has positioned its new satellite as a place to showcase global talents and connect contemporary art to the masterworks of the past. Check and check.

The Met should be credited with reanimating the galleries and welcoming the public back to an architectural masterwork (it's also one of the few New York museums with a pay-as-you-wish admission). But the larger question of the building's future remains.

What will happen after the Met's eight-year lease comes to an end? The best outcome would be for the Whitney to operate it as a second location, given the expectation-shattering crowds at its Piano building downtown.

In the meantime, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission should designate the building and give it lasting protection. While that wouldn't prevent Larry Gagosian or Tory Burch from turning the building into a stylish stage for their commercial interests, it would at very least prevent the wrecking ball and the next condo tower for the super rich from rising in its place.

Alan G Brake is a design journalist, editor, and critic. Alan was formerly executive editor of The Architect's Newspaper and has written for titles including Metropolis, Architectural Record and the New York Times.

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New York-based Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners sought to preserve the "authentic patina of aging materials" in its subtle refurbishment of the former Whitney Museum, which will reopen this month as The Met Breuer.

The Met Breuer is the new, temporary home for the contemporary and modern art collection of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met).

The landmark concrete and granite building was designed by the Hungarian architect Marcel Breuer and opened in 1966 in the city's Upper East Side neighbourhood.

It formerly housed the Whitney Museum, which moved to its new Renzo Piano-designed home in the Meatpacking District last April.

The Met, whose main campus is six blocks away, has leased the Breuer building for eight years, as it works toward completing a new wing for contemporary art designed by British architect David Chipperfield.

Press were invited to tour The Met Breuer this week, in advance of its public opening on 18 March. Instagram users started posting sneak peeks of the building earlier this year.

"It's a very exciting new chapter for the Met," said director Thomas P Campbell during today's event.

"This is a vast piece of mid-century architecture and we're going to be reactivating it with a new curatorial spirit and reweaving it in new ways into the cultural fabric of New York City."

Beyer Blinder Belle – a firm well known for its preservation and restoration of architectural landmarks, including the Empire State Building and Grand Central Terminal – worked with the Met's in-house design team on the project.

Encompassing 82,000 square feet (7,600 square metres), the building's bold style and intimate spaces, executed with great integrity, place it among New York's top mid-century modern buildings, said Beyer Blinder Belle.

"The privilege of restoring this iconic building and helping to transform it into The Met Breuer has been an immersive task, including extensive research and an understanding of Breuer's approach to design and materials," the firm said.

"His belief that materials become more dignified over time through weathering and use has guided our work."

Shaped like an inverted pyramid, the building has a two-storey glass wall that faces Madison Avenue.

Inside, distinctive features include a gridded concrete ceiling, trapezoidal windows, bluestone floors and disc-shaped lighting fixtures.

"The overall goal has been to approach the restoration as Breuer himself would have, carefully preserving the authentic patina of aging materials and allowing visitors to understand and appreciate the building's evolution over time," the firm said.

The firm gently cleaned areas that were soiled and repaired any damages. Floors were refinished, wood and metal stair railings were updated, and lighting fixtures were outfitted with LEDs.

"Our focus has been on restoring the building's signature attributes," said Beyer Blinder Belle.

Small interventions include a new ticketing desk and ticketing kiosks on the ground level, and a new restaurant below-grade that looks upon a sunken, open-air plaza with a row of trees. The restaurant is still under construction.

The team has also removed changes that were made to the building after 1966, such as the addition of retail shelving in the lobby.

"New interventions are limited and contemporary, and capture the spirit of Breuer's aesthetic and intent," said the firm.

The museum is presenting two inaugural exhibitions: works by Nasreen Mohamedi, the late Indian artist known for her line-based drawings, and Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible, which features a range of unresolved pieces by artists such as Cézanne and Jackson Pollock.

In July, the museum will stage an exhibition of early photographs by Diane Arbus, and in November, a show featuring photographs of Marcel Breuer buildings.

The Met, the largest art museum in the United States, recently unveiled a new logo by Wolff Olins – its first since the 1970s.

Photography is by Ed Lederman.

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Instagram users have been posting images of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's empty Breuer building in New York, before the interiors are populated with art works for its opening next month.

The first official images of the reinstalled interior of the seminal 1966 building by Hungarian Modernist architect Marcel Breuer are not due to be released until March.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) plans to hold a series of previews for press and supporters before it opens to the public on 18 March.

But a number of Instagram users, including critics, architects, and curators, have been given access to the interior during the transition and have shared images of the museum's lobby lighting, concrete staircases, trapezoidal windows, and other distinctive features.

The Met is borrowing the building for eight years, while its existing Modern art wing is demolished to be replaced with a new extension by British architect David Chipperfield.

The building was formerly home to the Whitney Musuem of American Art, which moved into its new Renzo Piano-designed home in Manhattan's Meatpacking district last year.

Considered a masterwork of the mid-century Brutalist style, typified by the use of raw concrete, the Breuer building has a top-heavy profile of cantilevered floors stacked above a sunken courtyard. The main entrance is accessed by a bridge.

While many Brutalist buildings in the US are facing destruction, Breuer's museum structure is a beloved landmark in New York.

In 1966 the late critic Ada Louise Huxtable called it "a mannered tour de force in the current mode of architecture for sculpture's sake".

She added that the building was one to savour over time: "The taste for its disconcertingly top-heavy, inverted pyramidal mass grows on one slowly, like a taste for olives or warm beer."

It has been rechristened The Met Breuer for its new occupants.

The first exhibitions in the space will be Unfinished: Thoughts Left Unfinished, a group exhibition questioning the idea of completeness in art, and Nasreen Mohamedi, a survey of work of the Indian abstract artist.

Among the images that have appeared on Instagram of the interior are a photograph by architecture critic Alexandra Lange.

Her picture shows the staircase leading to the lower level that previously contained the cafe and a temporary gift sales area, which now appears to have been cleared.

The Met's architecture and design curator Beatrice Galilee also gave a hint of an installation by landscape designer Gunther Vogt set to open in the sunken courtyard.

The Met, the largest art museum in the United States, recently unveiled a new logo by Wolff Olins – its first since the 1970s.

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art has unveiled a new logo designed by British-American branding firm Wolff Olins in advance of its expansion into the former home of the Whitney Museum, which will be known as the Met Breuer.

The new logo is a stacked version of the words The Met, as the museum is commonly called, with conjoined letters in each word.

The version that has been released shows the new logo in red, but it has also already appeared in white against a red background on promotional material for the Met Breuer.

It replaces a logo based on the letter M, surrounded by grids and circles like Leonardo da Vinci's famous drawing of the Vitruvian man, which the institution has used since the 1970s.

In a statement explaining the rationale behind the new design, the museum explained that it is meant to connect more directly with visitors.

"The new logo no longer relies on symbols and, instead, is based on the commonly used name The Met, which has an immediacy that speaks to all audiences," said the museum. "It is an original drawing, a hybrid that combines and connects serif and sans serif, classical and modern letterforms."

"In this respect, it reflects the scope of the museum's collection and the connections that exist within it," the museum added.

Initial reaction to the new logo has been less than positive. New York Magazine's architecture critic Justin Davidson called the design a "graphic misfire," adding that "the whole ensemble looks like a red double-decker bus that has stopped short, shoving the passengers into each other's backs."

"There may be debate about the logo because it involves change, but the museum chose it because it represents something simple, bold, and indisputable: The Met is here for everyone," said the museum.

Wolff Olins, the designer of the stacked logo, previously designed the identity for the Tate art galleries in London as well as the controversial 2012 London Olympics logo.

The Met's new identity will be used on maps, signage, the website, and all other materials representing the museums branches – including the flagship on Fifth Avenue, the Cloisters in Upper Manhattan, which is dedicated medieval art, and the soon-to-open Met Breuer, the new home for Modern and contemporary art, architecture, and design.

The Met Breuer is named for architect Marcel Breuer, who designed the Madison Avenue building that formerly housed the Whitney Museum until that institution decamped downtown to its new Renzo Piano-designed facility, which opened last year.

Dutch graphics studio Experimental Jetset redesigned The Whitney's logo in 2013.

David Chipperfield is currently designing a new addition to the rear of The Met's Fifth Avenue building. The Met is leasing the Breuer building from the Whitney.

Other logos that have recently met a mixed response include the new identity for taxi service Uber, which was compared to an "asshole", and the 2020 Tokyo Olympics branding, which was withdrawn after become involved in a plagiarism case.

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An exhibition opening this May at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art will examine how computer modelling, 3D printing, laser cutting and other "machine-based" fabrication methods are impacting high-end fashion.

The show, Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology, is being presented by the museum's Costume Institute. It opens 5 May 2016 and will be on view until 14 August 2016.

Shohei Shigematsu, director of OMA New York, will lead the exhibition design in collaboration with the museum's design department.

Manus x Machina aims to show how fashion designers are utilising technological advancements to create both haute couture and avant-garde ready-to-wear clothing. More than 100 pieces will be displayed, from an 1880s Worth gown to a 2015 Chanel suit.

"Traditionally, the distinction between the haute couture and prêt-à-porter was based on the handmade and the machine-made, but recently this distinction has become increasingly blurred as both disciplines have embraced the practises and techniques of the other," said Andrew Bolton, curator in charge of The Costume Institute.

"Manus x Machina will challenge the conventions of the hand/machine dichotomy and propose a new paradigm germane to our age of technology," he said.

The exhibition will address the founding of haute couture in the 19th century, when the sewing machine was invented, and the emergence of a distinction between the hand (manus) and the machine (machina).

It will explore these "discordant tools" and question the significance of the long-held distinction between haute couture and ready-to-wear.

"Fashion and technology are inextricably connected, more so now than ever before," said Thomas P Campbell, the museum's CEO and director. "This exhibition proposes a new view in which the hand and the machine, often presented as oppositional, are mutual and equal protagonists."

The show will be staged in two areas of the museum.

In the Robert Lehman Wing, visitors will see case studies that contrast haute couture and ready-to-wear ensembles.

Traditional elements of haute couture, such as embroidery, feathers, pleating, lacework and leatherwork, will be presented alongside pieces that were made using computer modelling, 3D printing, laser cutting, bonding and laminating, and other technologically advanced methods.

In the Anna Wintour Costume Center, the galleries will resemble a traditional fashion house with ateliers for tailoring and dressmaking.

"Toiles and prototypes will be presented as garments in the making, and as monuments to ideas," said the museum.

Works by dozens of designers will be featured in the show, including Christian Dior, Jean Paul Gaultier, Helmut Lang, Issey Miyake, Miuccia Prada, Yves Saint Laurent and many others.

Apple and media company Condé Nast are the main exhibition sponsors.

"Both the automated and handcrafted process require similar amounts of thoughtfulness and expertise," said Jonathan Ive, Apple's chief design officer.

"There are instances where technology is optimised, but ultimately it's the amount of care put into the craftsmanship, whether it's machine-made or handmade, that transforms ordinary materials into something extraordinary."

The show's opening will be preceded on 2 May 2016 by the Costume Institute's annual gala. OMA New York will lead the concept design for the event.

Ive, singer-songwriter Taylor Swift, actor and musician Idris Elba, and Vogue editor Anna Wintour are co-chairing the gala.

The Met's Spring exhibition in 2015 focussed on the fashion industry's obsession with China.

Other recent similar exhibitions include a show at Antwerp's Modemuseum about Spanish couturier Cristóbal Balenciaga, and an showcase of work by the late designer Alexander McQueen, which was shown in New York and London.

Photography is by Nicholas Alan Cope, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Competition: Dezeen has teamed up with New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art to offer readers the chance to win one of five pairs of tickets to a talk with Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima, co-founder of SANAA.

Congratulations to the winners! Joshua Padgett, Neil Logan, Jacqueline Ong, Martin Voelkle and Sergio Saucedo.

Taking place on 26 June, the lecture is part of the In Our Time series organised by Beatrice Galilee, the museum's Daniel Brodsky associate curator of architecture and design.

Dezeen has paired up with The Metropolitan Museum of Art as media partner for In Our Time, which focuses on showcasing the work of architects that will be seen as influential by future generations.

Kazuyo Sejima founded Japanese firm SANAA with fellow architect Ryue Nishizawa in 1995. The duo – who often work separately as well as under the banner of their studio – are known for buildings that use extensive glazing to help create a sense of transparency.

"SANAA is one of the most extraordinary and original architecture studios of our time and Kazuyo Sejima one of the most important architects," said Galilee. "The work is consistent in its grace and delicacy but is equally always pushing materials and technologies in order to build a new vision of what a contemporary space can be, and how it can feel."

Among the firm's best known projects are the Rolex Learning Center in Lausanne, Switzerland, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, and the Christian Dior Building in Omotesando in Tokyo. In 2010, Sejima and Nishizawa were awarded the Prizker Prize.

Sejima's lecture will touch on the firm's River building – a meandering glass, concrete and steel structure with transparent walkways, courtyards and rooms. Due to complete this autumn, the building was commissioned for the not-for-profit Grace Farms parkland project in New Canaan, Connecticut, which is anchored by a community church.

The talk will be followed by a conversation with Yuko Hasegawa, chief curator at Tokyo's Museum of Contemporary Art, with whom Sejima is collaborating on the Grace Farms project.

The first event in the In Our Time series took place in May and featured Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, who spoke of his desire to replace Modernism's "boring box" legacy with new kinds of localised architecture. Other speakers in the series include Chilean architects Pezo von Ellrichshausen.

We are offering five readers the chance to win a pair of tickets to Kazuyo Sejima's talk at the museum on 26 June 2015, which has just 100 spaces. The event will start at 6pm EST. Winners must provide their own travel and accommodation.

This competition has now closed. Five winners will be selected at random and notified by email, and winners' names will be published at the top of this page. Dezeen competitions are international and entries are accepted from readers in any country. NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER AND WIN. VOID WHERE PROHIBITED. Entrants must be 18 years or older. This contest is sponsored by Dezeen. The participation of The Metropolitan Museum of Art is limited to the providing of the ticket prizes.

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Competition: Dezeen has paired up with New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art to offer readers the chance to win one of five pairs of tickets to an intimate talk with Chile-based architects Mauricio Pezo and Sofa von Ellrichshausen.

Congratulations to the winners! Angeline Yang, Andrew Kao, Rob Bundy, Amelia Stein and Andrew Sack.

Taking place on 19 June, the lecture is part of the In Our Time series organised by Beatrice Galilee, the museum's Daniel Brodsky associate curator of architecture and design.

Pezo von Ellrichshausen has established itself as one of Chile's leading contemporary architecture studios over the past 10 years, designing a series of private homes that aim to combine principles of art and architecture.

The duo's recent work includes a dyed-yellow house with no corridors and a residence with 12 split levels arranged around a concrete spiral staircase.

"They have consistently been producing beautiful, intimate and wilful architecture under changing and sometimes volatile economic conditions in Chile and as such represent many of the fantastic young practices that have emerged in Latin America over the past decade," said Galilee.

"I hope they will talk about some of the particular understanding of the relationship between architecture and society that is unique to the climate in which they work," she added.

"There is a thread of small scale, temporary artistic practice that runs through their work too, which I love and is also a way for many young firms to experiment and test their bigger ideas on small scales."

The talk will be followed by a conversation with Felix Burrichter, editor of PIN-UP Magazine.

Dezeen has teamed up with The Metropolitan Museum of Art as media partner for In Our Time – which will also include a talk by Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima.

The first event in the series took place in May and featured Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, who spoke of his desire to replace Modernism's "boring box" legacy with new kinds of localised architecture.

We are offering five readers the chance to win a pair of tickets to Pezo von Ellrichshausen's talk at the museum on 19 June 2015, which has just 100 spaces. The event will start at 6pm EST. Winners must provide their own travel and accommodation.

This competition has now closed. Five winners will be selected at random and notified by email, and winners' names will be published at the top of this page. Dezeen competitions are international and entries are accepted from readers in any country. NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER AND WIN. VOID WHERE PROHIBITED. Entrants must be 18 years or older. This contest is sponsored by Dezeen. The participation of The Metropolitan Museum of Art is limited to the providing of the ticket prizes.

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Bjarke Ingels has spoken of his desire to replace Modernism's "boring box" legacy with new kinds of localised architecture at a lecture at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art (+ transcript).

"What we've been interested in is in a way not to return to the vernacular, but what you can call 'Vernacular 2.0'," said the architect, who is founder of Danish architecture firm BIG.

Ingels was speaking at the first in a series of lectures by influential architects, organised earlier this month by the Met's architecture curator Beatrice Galilee. Dezeen is media partner for the lectures.

Ingels said he wanted to break away from the identikit architecture created by the combined forces of Modernism and climate-control systems.

"The International Style of Modernism came with the advent of building services. In the end, the architecture became like a container space, essentially like a boring box with a basement full of machinery to make it inhabitable," he said. "As a result, buildings literally started to look identical all over the planet."

This global style failed to offer people choice and is forcing residents to adapt their lifestyles to the buildings, he said, adding that architects were finally realising people around the world want to live in different ways, requiring different styles of architecture that could be localised and responsive to different environments.

And he said that new technologies would enable architects to take back control of this design process.

"Today we have sophisticated building technology, we can calculate and simulate the environments and performance of the building, the thermal exposure of envelop, or the air flow through an urban space or structure."

"Rather than 'Architecture without Architects', it actually allows us to do 'Engineering without Engines'," he explained. "We can engineer a building and design a building with least reliance on active machinery to make it inhabitable."

Ingels' firm has designed a wide range of unique buildings, with current projects including VIA – also known as West 57th – a New York housing development with a rectangular plan pulled up at one corner to form a triangular tower; a series of storm defence initiatives for Manhattan; the Amager Bakke Waste-to-Energy Plant with a ski-slope on its roof and a smoke-ring-blowing chimney; and a snail-shaped house for a car collector in Denmark.

The architect was the first participant in the In Our Time lecture series, a new venture from the Met.

The series, which focuses on contemporary work by architects who "will be remembered in the future as being part of our time", is organised by Galilee, who is the museum's Daniel Brodsky associate curator of architecture and design. Among the upcoming speakers are Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima and Chile-based duo Pezo von Ellrichshausen.

Ingels' lecture was followed by a Q&A with Galilee, during which he described himself as having "drunk the Kool-Aid" for being a fan of Google – for which he is building a new headquarters in Mountain View, California, with British designer Thomas Heatherwick.

Read the edited transcript of the Q&A between Bjarke Ingels and Beatrice Galilee:

Beatrice Galilee: You are pretty young for an architect – 40 years old. When we first met, which was quite a few years ago, we talked about your career starting at a time where Frank Gehry was becoming an icon maker, and people were becoming dot-com millionaires. Can you tell us a little bit about your early years?

Bjarke Ingels: One of the dilemmas of architecture in general is that there is a Catch-22 – you can't actually get to be commissioned to do certain types of building until you've already built that type of building. So it seems to be incredibly hard to get going.

We were very fascinated by this idea of dot-com billionaires being in their 20s, and we weren't looking forward to being unable to get commissions until we were deep into our 40s. So we actually tried to apply for different grants for doing IT projects and some films. In the end, we secured zero funding for all of our non-architectural attempts. We also worked on some open competitions on the side, which we actually end up winning, so it turns out to be easier to become what you trained for six years in school rather than changing professions.

One thing that I really discovered since moving to America five years ago, is that Europe is a little bit stuck in the technocracy and bureaucracy of public tendering projects that I actually experience over here a much more courageous ability to think laterally, to basically say: "OK, you guys have already proven that you can think, that you can handle complex projects whether large projects or complicated situations, so even though you haven't necessarily done [a project] like a museum or a concert hall or stadium or whatever it is, we can see that you are capable of handling complex situations, and we are willing to bet on your ability to do so."

We actually got the commission from the Smithsonian Institution to rethink their entire south campus master plan project for $2 billion, at the point where we had not even completed the Danish Maritime Museum yet. They are basically entrusting us with the crown jewels of American subculture and history, having not really built the museum yet, which I think is a uniquely American way. This is almost unimaginable in Europe.

Beatrice Galilee: How much do you think your success is to do with also the way you talk about your work – your ability to talk about architecture in a way that is very persuasive and compelling?

Bjarke Ingels: One of the conditions of architecture is that a building has to be able to live in its own right. A building shouldn't rely on having somebody speak on its behalf. It should speak for itself. But the problem is that it is always judged before it is built.

Other art forms can somehow be materialised, a painter can actually paint a painting and you can judge the artwork from being done. In architecture, building is so expensive and relies on so many permits, so many different decision makers need to make decisions around it, so that in order for a building to be able to prove its worth as an artwork or as environment, you already have to get past like a thousand nos.

For a painter, it's a canvas, a brush and a paint, that is his or her materials. For the architects, it is our capacity to listen to the concerns and demands of the users and the clients, and then to communicate our ideas to the clients, to the public officials, to the craftsmen going to build it – because if you can't transmit your ideas, they will never get materialised. For architects, our ability to communicate ideas and transmit ideas is almost like our paint and brush.

Beatrice Galilee: How does that work when you work with, for example, technology? Architecture is slow, and you are dealing with Google, who are much more nimble – they are already 10 years ahead. How do you catch up with technology as an architect?

Bjarke Ingels: I think quite often you ask a lot of architects, to try to combine available materials and available technologies in interesting ways to create new qualities. But I think in the case of Google, it is a company where their entire business model is that they are used to actually sinking a lot of resources into non-recoverable engineering, and then eventually, once they actually hit the gold, then they can actually replicate that infinitely and it can become valuable.

They don't want marble floors, gold leaf or solid gold, but they don't mind spending a lot of resources on trying to develop a technology or material or product that once it has been developed, you can then replicate very affordably.

There is an incredible belief in the value of research and development and design. In one of our first conversations, Larry Page was talking about some kind of system that could pick up people's cars and deliver them. It sounded like he was referring to an existing system, and I asked if it was something that is available in the industry that we could look into. He said "we did a little bit of research, and it is not something really out there, but it is not something that $50 million can't solve."

We haven't seen that amount of resource yet, but at least there is this idea that it is really worth it and valuable to spend a lot of energy trying to develop something that isn't yet available.

Beatrice Galilee: Your Google campus project has been described as the Truman Show. How do you feel about that? Potentially with Google, you are kind of absorbing a brand identity that some people regard as slightly terrifying in terms of controlling, absorbing information and so on. You are creating a work environment that is potentially politically a bit scary.

Bjarke Ingels: I think Google is an incredible company, it has an incredible company structure. The reason that they are now being seen as this thing to be suspicious about is because of the incredible success of what they are giving away basically for free, right?

Because it is so incredibly accessible, of course they become our window to a major part of our research, our knowledge, etc. So I think it is like a non-criticism – because of their awesomeness that they cause people to be suspicious.

The project we are making for them is so incredibly generous to the neighbourhood that they are part of. They have created bus lines that allow them to take cars off the highway, off the public system, by picking up their own workers and facilitating the commute with a free communal, collective transportation system – that's awesome!

But because the people of Google like to live closer to where the bus lines are, it is driving up the real estate value, and suddenly they are encountering people that throw stones at the buses, because it seems like they're accelerating gentrification, but actually it is a great thing that they are doing.

We just want to try to continue this incredible citizenship that they actually show by contributing to the resilience of Mountain View with landscaping, by actually making the building really inviting and open, people can literally pass through them. In fact, I couldn't think of a more generous company... I feel like I drank the Kool-Aid.

Beatrice Galilee: Ok, I will just end with an In Our Time themed question. How do you think that people want to live now?

Bjarke Ingels: I think the answer is that people are different, and therefore housing should also be different. You want to somehow contribute as many different qualities as possible. I am actually shopping for an apartment right now.

I'm really obsessed about the outdoor space. And I think traditionally, places like New York have been very anti-outdoor space. But I think most of the developers that we are working with are beginning to realise that there is actually something there. I think maybe the fact that New York is a much cleaner city now than it was maybe 20 years ago makes the outdoor more desirable.

Modernism was based on this idea that for every problem, there is a universal solution that would be an ideal solution that could be repeated infinitely. I think today the realisation is much more that people are different, therefore the way that people want to live is incredibly different.

As architects, as clients, and as developers, we have the responsibility to really try to not think about universal solutions, but actually try to take the risk and show the courage to put some diversity out there.

Because once you put some choices out there, there are actually a lot of different tastes rather than this narrow real-estate-agent-driven definition of demand. People kind of require something that they can't really request. There is almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy that if you only offer a certain way to live, then of course that is going to be sold, and inhabited and rented out.

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The influence of Chinese culture on fashion design is examined through garments by Alexander McQueen, Yves Saint Laurent, John Galliano and more in an exhibition at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art (+ slideshow).

Organised by the Costume Institute, China: Through the Looking Glass is presented across the Met's Chinese Galleries and Anna Wintour Costume Center.

The museum's first exhibition spanning two departments since 2006, it includes 140 examples of haute couture and ready-to-wear garments, which are displayed against traditional Chinese costumes, paintings, porcelain and other artefacts.

The show aims to present the influences of these cultural objects – ranging from early Imperial China to the 20th-century Communist era – on contemporary fashion, from colour and form to decorative patterns.

"From the earliest period of European contact with China in the 16th century, the West has been enchanted with enigmatic objects and imagery from the East, providing inspiration for fashion designers from Paul Poiret to Yves Saint Laurent, whose fashions are infused at every turn with romance, nostalgia, and make-believe," said Costume Institute curator Andrew Bolton.

"Through the looking glass of fashion, designers conjoin disparate stylistic references into a fantastic pastiche of Chinese aesthetic and cultural traditions."

The exhibition was art directed by filmmaker Wong Kar Wai and styled by William Chang, and is laid out as a "cinematic experience".

"Historically, there have been many cases of being 'lost in translation' – with good and revealing results," said Wong. "As Chinese filmmakers we hope to create a show that is an Empire of Signs – filled with meaning for both East and West to discover and decipher."

At the entrance to the galleries, transparent glass tubes lit from below create the effect of a bamboo forest in which garments from British designer Craig Green's Spring Summer 2015 collection are displayed. The 2004 film House of Flying Daggers, which features fight scenes in bamboo groves, plays on a screen behind.

Each room on the upper floor is dedicated to a particular influence. For example, dark red gowns are grouped in a space surrounded by rosewood furniture.

In another area, mannequins wear garments printed and embroidered to look like the intricately decorated blue and white porcelain that has been used in China since the Tang Dynasty.

The figures also sport headdresses made from sections of broken plate patterned in the same style, designed by milliner Stephen Jones who created all of headpieces that feature in the exhibition.

Further rooms show the influences of calligraphy, scent and painting, all within environments designed to reflect each medium.

Downstairs, one room is dedicated to interpretations of the Qipao – a form-hugging dress with a distinctive high neck and buttoning that became popular in 1920s Shanghai.

Also on display are variations of the khaki green Zhongshan suit worn by leaders of the Communist party, which took control of the country in 1949. The outfit is also known as the Mao suit after the first chairman of the People's Republic of China.

Screens in the connecting spaces present clips of women who helped to proliferate images of Chinese style in the western media, including Butterfly Wu, Madame Wellington Koo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek.

The exhibition includes a range of pieces from Yves Saint Laurent's Autumn Winter 1977 Chinese and Opium haute-couture collection, and a selection from John Galliano's time as creative director at Dior.

Works by Cristobal Balenciaga, Roberto Cavalli, Coco Chanel, Jean Paul Gaultier, Valentino Garavani, Jeanne Lanvin, Ralph Lauren, Christian Louboutin, Martin Margiela, Alexander McQueen, Dries van Noten, Paul Smith and Vivienne Westwood are among the others on show.

China: Through the Looking Glass continues until 16 August 2015.

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New York 2015: patches of dirt and an aquarium with ancient species are part of a new installation by French artist Pierre Huyghe for the roof garden at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art (+ slideshow).

Unveiled today, the installation is part of a yearly program in which artists are commissioned to create site-specific work for the museum's popular Iris and B Gerald Cantor Roof Garden, which overlooks Central Park and offers sweeping views of Manhattan. Past artists have included Dan Graham, Jeff Koons, and Doug and Mike Starn.

While artists typically focus on form and spectacle, Huyghe – who is known for conceptual installations that often incorporate natural elements – took a markedly different approach. "I was more interested in having people look down and focus on the details," he told Dezeen.

To accomplish this, the artist created an installation that calls to mind a geological dig. Huyghe removed approximately 20 granite pavers from the rooftop, revealing swaths of dirt speckled with debris.

A large aquarium releases a trickle of water that gradually passes through the dirt patches, in some areas collecting and forming murky puddles. "The water will eventually make its way back into the sewer system of the museum," said Huyghe. "There is a ritual going on."

The aquarium contains large, rounded rocks and several ancient living worms and tadpole shrimp. "They are the oldest species alive," said Huyghe of the creatures, noting that their form and behaviour haven't changed for millions of years. He sees the aquarium as a "preserving machine," he told Dezeen.

While the installation mostly features local materials, Huyghe integrated several Palaeolithic rocks — human's first tools — from Europe or Africa, he said. The composition also features a large limestone boulder found in New York.

According to the Met, the installation draws references from various objects in the museum's collection, including ancient Egyptian sculptures and a mummy dating to the sixth century.

Ian Alteveer, the Met's associate curator of modern and contemporary art, said the museum offered little guidance regarding the installation's design. "It really is Pierre who has formed this project," Alteveer told Dezeen. "It began for him as an examination of the place — the museum itself and what surrounds it. It was less about bringing things here and more about uncovering what's already here."

The Roof Garden Commission: Pierre Huyghe is open to the public from 12 May to 1 November 2015. In addition, the museum is presenting Untitled (Human Mask), a 19-minute film by Huyghe that depicts a creature's survival following natural and man-made disasters. The film is on view inside the museum through 9 August 2015.

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Competition: Dezeen has paired up with New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art to offer readers the chance to win one of five tickets to an invite-only talk with Bjarke Ingels this evening.

Congratulations to the winners! Han Huynh, Sterrin O'Shea, Kunal Ghevaria, Christopher Peppel and Gary Stephan all won tickets to Bjarke Ingels' talk.

The lecture will be the first in a series organised by the museum's Daniel Brodsky associate curator of architecture and design Beatrice Galilee, called In Our Time.

"The idea behind In Our Time is to focus on contemporary work – ideas, projects and people that will be remembered in the future as being a key part of our time," said Galilee.

"There has always been architecture at the Met, but these talks mark a new beginning for contemporary architecture and design programming."

Ingels, founder of Danish firm BIG, has recently been awarded a string of major projects in America – including the job of designing Google's new headquarters in California with London-based Thomas Heatherwick.

Dezeen has paired up with The Metropolitan Museum of Art as media sponsor for In Our Time – which will also include talks by Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima and Chile-based duo Pezo von Ellrichshausen among others.

We are offering five readers the chance to win a ticket to this evening's talk, which is otherwise invite-only and has just 100 spaces. The event will start at 6pm EST, 1 May 2015.

Winners must provide their own travel and accommodation.

This competition is now closed. Five winners will be selected at random and notified by email, and winners' names will be published at the top of this page. Dezeen competitions are international and entries are accepted from readers in any country. NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER AND WIN. VOID WHERE PROHIBITED. Entrants must be 18 years or older. This contest is sponsored by Dezeen. The participation of The Metropolitan Museum of Art is limited to the providing of the ticket prizes.

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British architect David Chipperfield has been selected to design a new wing for New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced today that it had appointed David Chipperfield's firm to rebuild its southwest wing for modern and contemporary art.

Gallery space for the museum's collection will be increased, the existing roof garden will double in size and an accessible on-site storage facility will be created. The firm could also be asked to add new galleries for art from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, according to the museum.

The British architect – whose portfolio includes the Neues Museum in Berlin and Hepworth Wakefield gallery in northern England – was selected ahead of firms including Foster + Partners for his "vision, experience, and compatibility", said museum director and CEO Thomas P Campbell.

"David Chipperfield’s global architectural experience and sensibility, along with his commitment to the collaborative aspect of creating architecture, make him a perfect partner on this milestone project," said Campbell.

The design is yet to be revealed, but it is expected to extend out into the museum's grounds and include a new park side entrance, with a brief to enhance gallery configuration and improve navigation for visitors.

"The goal in our work with David and his team is to take a giant leap forward in the presentation of modern and contemporary art at the Met, and to be able to better tell the multiple narratives of the art of our time," added Campbell.

During construction, the Met's collection will be moved to the Marcel Breuer-designed former home of the Whitney, which is moving into a structure by Italian architect Renzo Piano. The Met is occupying the Breuer Building with an eight-year lease.

The project forms part of a wider masterplan by New York firm Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners for the future of the institution, which is the largest museum of art in the United States.

The new vision aims to incorporate state-of-the-art technologies into the museum complex. It follows on from the 1971 masterplan for the institution created by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Kevin Roche, who has designed most of the Met's new-build projects since then – including six new wings.

Other recent projects have included new galleries for Islamic art completed in 2011, new galleries for the American Wing completed in 2012, and the recently opened Anna Wintour Costume Center.

Chipperfield's appointment is the result of a year-long selection process that included over 50 international firms. Development of the design will begin immediately.

"During the competition we developed an understanding and fondness for this amazing institution and we look forward to working with Tom Campbell and his colleagues on the development of the design," said the architect.

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News: British curator Beatrice Galilee has been appointed to a newly created role as curator of architecture and design at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Beatrice Galilee, who was chief curator of the Lisbon Architecture Triennale last summer, will take up one of two new positions at The Metropolitan Museum in the department of modern and contemporary art, as part of an expansion that will see the institute move into the Marcel Breuer-designed museum building on Madison Avenue currently occupied by The Whitney.

"Beatrice Galilee will join the staff of our department of modern and contemporary art as it expands to embrace a more global program and mandate," said museum director Thomas P. Campbell. "She brings to the position her strong international experience in the presentation and study of architecture and design-related work."

Department chairman Sheena Wagstaff added: "This is a new position at the Museum, and a timely appointment that will enhance a vital area of scholarship as we build the collection and plan our programming for the Breuer project. We are thrilled to welcome a curator with a reputation for her innovative approach as well as a comprehensive knowledge of the field."

Starting later this spring, Galilee's position is entitled Daniel Brodsky Associate Curator of Architecture and Design after the museum's chairman, while a second position dedicated to Latin American Art will be named after Brodsky's wife and art historian Estrellita B. Brodsky.

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An exhibition charting punk's influence on high fashion has opened at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York this week. Above: Chanel by David Sims, 2011.

Aiming to examine the relationship between 1970s anarchic subculture and fashion design today, vintage punk outfits are shown alongside contemporary clothing by brands such as Alexander McQueen, Martin Margiela and Karl Lagerfeld.

"Since its origins, punk has had an incendiary influence on fashion," said Andrew Bolton, curator in The Costume Institute at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Although punk’s democracy stands in opposition to fashion’s autocracy, designers continue to appropriate punk’s aesthetic vocabulary to capture its youthful rebelliousness and aggressive forcefulness," he said.

Approximately 100 garments for both sexes are displayed across seven galleries, each with a different theme.

One room is based on iconic Manhattan music bar CBGB, represented by bands such as Blondie and the Ramones, while the space opposite takes reference from Malcolm McClaren and Vivienne Westwood’s Seditionaries boutique at 430 King’s Road in London.

Located in the museum's second-floor Cantor galleries, Punk: Chaos to Couture opened earlier this week and runs until 14 August 2013.

More fashion exhibitions currently on show include a collection of David Bowie Is costume, set and album cover design at London's V&A museum and a range of fetishistic prosthetics, also in the British capital.

See more architecture and design exhibitions »
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Read the full press release from the museum below:

Punk Fashion Is Focus of Costume Institute Exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Exhibition dates: 9 May – 14 August 2013
Exhibition location: Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Exhibition Hall

PUNK: Chaos to Couture, organized by The Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, examines punk’s impact on high fashion from the movement’s birth in the 1970s through its continuing influence today. The exhibition is on view from 9 May through 14 August at the Museum.

The Exhibition

The exhibition, in the Museum’s second-floor Cantor galleries, features approximately 100 designs for men and women. A few iconic punk garments from the mid-1970s are juxtaposed with recent, directional fashion to illustrate how haute couture and ready-to-wear have borrowed punk’s visual symbols, with paillettes being replaced with safety pins, feathers with razor blades, and bugle beads with studs. Focusing on the relationship between the punk concept of 'do-it-yourself' and the couture concept of 'made to measure,' the exhibition is organised around the materials, techniques, and embellishments associated with the anti-establishment style. Presented as an immersive multimedia experience, the clothes are animated with vintage videos and soundscaping audio techniques.

Organized thematically, each of the seven galleries has footage of designated punk ‘heroes’ who embody the broader concepts behind the fashions on view. The first gallery is devoted to CBGB in New York City, represented by Blondie, Richard Hell, The Ramones, and Patti Smith. Opposite is a gallery inspired by Malcolm McClaren and Vivienne Westwood’s Seditionaries boutique at 430 King’s Road in London, and between the two is Clothes for Heroes, embodied by a slow motion video of Jordan. This gallery examines designers who extend the visual language of punk, as it was originally articulated by McLaren and Westwood, by merging social realism with artistic expression.

Do-it-yourself, punk’s enduring contribution to high fashion, is explored in the four final galleries: D.I.Y. Hardware, focusing on couture’s use of studs, spikes, chains, zippers, padlocks, safety pins, and razor blades, with Sid Vicious as its icon; D.I.Y. Bricolage, highlighting the impact of punk’s ethos of customization on high fashion, including the use of recycled materials from trash and consumer culture, as epitomized by Wayne County; D.I.Y. Graffiti and Agitprop, exploring punk’s tradition of provocation and confrontation through images and text exemplified by The Clash; and D.I.Y. Destroy, examining the effect of punk’s rip-it-to-shreds spirit, typified by Johnny Rotten, via torn and shredded garments associated with deconstructionism.

Designers in the exhibition include Miguel Adrover, Thom Browne, Christopher Bailey (Burberry), Hussein Chalayan, Francisco Costa (Calvin Klein), Christophe Decarnin (Balmain), Ann Demeulemeester, Dior, Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana (Dolce and Gabbana), John Galliano, Nicolas Ghesquière (Balenciaga), Katharine Hamnett, Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren (Viktor & Rolf), Christopher Kane, Rei Kawakubo (Comme des Garçons), Karl Lagerfeld (Chanel), Helmut Lang, Martin Margiela, Malcolm McLaren, Alexander McQueen, Franco Moschino and Rossella Jardini (Moschino), Kate and Laura Mulleavy (Rodarte), Miuccia Prada, Gareth Pugh, Zandra Rhodes, Hedi Slimane (Saint Laurent), Stephen Sprouse, Jun Takahashi (Undercover), Riccardo Tisci (Givenchy), Gianni Versace, Junya Watanabe, Yohji Yamamoto, and Vivienne Westwood.

The exhibition is organized by Andrew Bolton, Curator, in the Met’s Costume Institute. Photographer Nick Knight is the exhibition’s creative consultant working with exhibition design consultant Sam Gainsbury (who was creative director for the Met’s Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty exhibition in 2011) and production designer Gideon Ponte (a set and production designer for photo shoots and feature films including Buffalo 66 and American Psycho). All mannequin head treatments and masks are designed by Guido Palau, who also created treatments for Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty and last year’s Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations.

The design for the 2013 Costume Institute gala benefit is created by Nick Knight, Sam Gainsbury, and Gideon Ponte with Raul Avila, who has produced the benefit décor since 2007. Additional funding for the gala benefit is provided by Givenchy.

Related Catalogue and Programs

A book, Punk: Chaos to Couture, by Andrew Bolton, with an introduction by Jon Savage, and prefaces by Richard Hell and John Lydon (a.k.a. Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols), accompanies the exhibition. This publication is illustrated with photographs of vintage punks and high fashion. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the $45 catalogue (hard cover only) is distributed worldwide by Yale University Press.

A series of programs will be presented in conjunction with the exhibition, including a Sunday at the Met discussion on the origins of punk with Glenn O'Brien, Jon Savage, and Roberta Bayley on June 16; a gallery conversation with Vivien Goldman and Curator Ian Alteveer on July 26; and performances by Liars on May 18; and by So Percussion as wellas Man Forever on June 8; a studio workshop on July 20; and related gallery talks in the Museum’s permanent collection.

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