The people milling about the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new Ruth and Harold D. Uris Center for Education during its public opening yesterday were as diverse as the Met’s education programs, ranging from a family of five waiting for story time in the children’s reading area to a sizable number of white-haired senior citizens. There were also a few members of the Met’s curatorial staff eager to get their first glimpse of the results of the three-year, $75 million renovation that finished only last week.

In 25,000 square feet, the new Uris Center contains the Carson Family Hall, where families and student groups can be received, a WiFi-equipped library, an art studio, a 150-seat lecture hall, classrooms and a seminar room, and an art study room. The art study room is climate- and humidity-controlled and includes a high-security vault, allowing for artworks to be brought down from the galleries to be examined. As part of the programming yesterday, a European paintings curator, Maryan Ainsworth, and the Met’s head of paintings conservation, Michael Gallagher, spoke to an audience about the restoration of a Lucas Cranach panel painting, displayed at the front of the room.

“As far as I know, it’s unique among museum facilities,” the Met’s associate director for education, Kent Lydecker, said of the art study room. “If you’re teaching a graduate seminar that involves works from several departments, you can bring them together there.”

The Met’s education programs include class visits for schoolchildren; workshops for teachers on subjects from Roman Art to Abstract Expressionism; family programs; drawing classes for middle school students, and supervised independent study in art history for teenagers. There is also a wide array of programs for adults, from lectures, including the Sunday at the Met series, to drawing classes, as well as “Touch Tours” for people who are blind or partially sighted, and special programs for people with developmental or learning disabilities, or Alzheimer’s disease.

The Uris Center originally opened in 1983. It was funded by a $10 million gift from Harold Uris, who made his fortune constructing office buildings in Manhattan, and his wife, Ruth. The current renovation was supported by numerous gifts, which are reflected in the names of its different rooms: In addition to the Carson Family Hall, which honors the gift of Met trustee Russell Carson and his family, there is the central Diane W. Burke Hall, the Nolen Library (named for Eliot and Roland Nolen), the Carroll Classroom (named for Jane and Robert Carroll), and the Bonnie J. Sacerdote Lecture Hall.

Although art education has long been part of the Met’s mission, the philosophy behind the programs, and therefore the facilities required, have changed over time.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Mr. Lydecker said, the Met was a leader in the “junior museum movement,” and had its own Junior Museum, with exhibitions specially designed for children, located at the north end of the building. That approach gave way in the 1970s to one that favored “introducing kids to the entirety of the collection,” Mr. Lydecker said — although, through the 1980s, the Uris Center included a display of art.

In its new configuration, it does not, though Mr. Lydecker said the museum is not closed to that possibility in the future. “It was a calculation of how much space we have and the number of people we can welcome comfortably,” he said.

“There will be days when we have in excess of 2,000 students coming and leaving,” Mr. Lydecker continued, and the goal is to receive them “with an honor and a dignity appropriate to the Met.”

The new Uris Center, designed by Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates, features limestone floors, digital signage in the entrance hall, and a special backlit projection screen in the art study room, which means that images can be projected without darkening the room.

The renovation exposes many windows that were covered over or obscured in the old Uris Center, and there are light and lively ground-level views onto Fifth Avenue and Central Park.

“We can do great teaching in a shabby space,” Mr. Lydecker said. “But isn’t it better to do it in a beautiful space?”