The Met’s Fifth Avenue facade is primarily made of limestone.
The monumental facade facing Central Park is a limestone-clad Beaux-Arts composition, best known for its grand arches, columns, sculpture, and broad entrance steps. The stone gives the building its pale, imposing appearance and helps connect it visually with the classical civic architecture of New York’s Gilded Age.
Architect Richard Morris Hunt designed the central Fifth Avenue facade and the Great Hall in the late nineteenth century. After Hunt’s death in 1895, his son Richard Howland Hunt completed the work. The principal facade and entrance were opened in 1902, while the architectural firm McKim, Mead & White completed additional wings along Fifth Avenue in 1910.
Limestone does not mean every visible or structural part of the museum is limestone. The Met is an accretion of more than twenty structures, including later additions with different materials and designs. Granite and other stones also appear in parts of the wider complex, but limestone is the characteristic primary material of the historic Fifth Avenue frontage. Marble is more strongly associated with some interior architectural finishes and artworks.