Why Frida Escobedo is in the Design 100

Escobedo’s international reputation was set in 2018, when she became the first woman in almost two decades to design the Serpentine Pavilion, and its youngest architect, working out of her own Mexico City studio rather than a larger international office. The latticed concrete courtyard — built from British roof tiles arranged as a Mexican celosía screen and aligned to the Greenwich meridian — established a vocabulary of patterned, permeable structures she has returned to since.

That vocabulary is now being tested at a far larger scale. Escobedo is the architect behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new Tang Wing for modern and contemporary art, due to open in 2030 — the first time a woman has designed a wing in the museum’s 154-year history, and a project expanding its contemporary galleries by close to half. It is exactly the kind of commission that moves an architect from specialist press into the wider cultural conversation this index is built to track.