The Metropolitan Museum of Art can feel less like a single collection than a series of places brought into conversation. On Fifth Avenue, an Egyptian temple stands within a New York museum, domestic interiors preserve different ways of living, and paintings offer other measures of distance and time. The challenge is not finding something to see. It is choosing a route that leaves enough attention for the objects along it.
The institution was incorporated in 1870 and opened at its present Fifth Avenue site in 1880. The first building there, designed by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould, was gradually surrounded by later additions. Richard Morris Hunt's Fifth Avenue façade and Great Hall opened in 1902. What appears from the street as a monumental whole is therefore a layered history of expansion, rather than the result of one architectural moment.
