Founded in 1870 by a group of citizens, collectors, and artists with the idea of creating a great public museum for the city, it opened to the public in 1872. After its first years in provisional locations, it settled on the edge of Central Park from 1880 onward. The building began with a project by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould, and it took on its most emblematic image with the great façade and lobby designed by Richard Morris Hunt. From then on it grew through successive additions, becoming a vast complex of rooms, galleries, and courtyards, with an architecture that mixes periods and styles. In the 1920s, the museum was already a fully consolidated and expanding institution: it increased its collections and cultural presence in the city notably, and opened key spaces such as the American Wing (1924), which strengthened its focus on the decorative arts and the material history of the United States.