The Met
Visitor Resting Spots
Create an intervention within the context of The Metropolitan Museum of Art that aims to alleviate visitor fatigue, encourage longer stays, and promote deeper engagement with the artwork.
The Challenge: Museum Fatigue in Audiences
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, or ‘The Met,’ is one of the world’s largest art museums, with over two million works displayed across vast galleries. Its scale can leave visitors overwhelmed, making seating essential to comfort, accessibility, and deeper engagement with the art. My design reimagines seating as integrated spatial elements—places to pause and reflect. During my visit, I found existing seating limited in number and poorly related to the galleries they occupy.
Site 1
For the first site within the museum, I selected a series of small, interconnected rooms in the 19th and Early 20th Century European Paintings and Sculpture Galleries, which can feel overwhelming due to their dense displays and limited space.
Ideation
A 6-foot offset from each room’s perimeter defines the intervention space, allowing visitors to navigate the galleries while focusing resting in the center. Within this space, various spatial forms were explored by linking circulation paths and entryways.
Final Concept
This concept links opposite sides of each entryway to generate corresponding shapes, which were then reinterpreted as space dividers and seating.
Design Details
The resting spots feature two seating types: outward-facing seats with 90 degree edges encourage brief engagement with nearby artworks, while inward-facing curved seats invite a more relaxed, longer-term rest. Their varying heights reveal or obscure paintings as visitors move through the space, and integrated wayfinding signage helps guide circulation through the galleries.
Site 2
To test this design in a larger space, it was implemented in The Met’s Great Hall. As the busy main entrance, the area can feel chaotic, and the resting spots could give visitors a moment to pause and orient themselves before exploring the galleries.
Diagramming the Site
Here, an 8-foot offset from the room’s perimeter accommodates high traffic. Entryways were again linked to identify corresponding forms, which were then reimagined as space dividers and seating.
Final Concept
The seating effectively divides the space, guiding visitors to the different gallery entrances while offering areas for those who wish to take a break.