Content area
Full Text
Renzo Piano has become the architect of choice for art museums today. Since the acclaimed Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (with Richard Rogers, 1977), he has completed 10 museum projects and has five more in progress. His exhibition spaces have been characterized as serene, never competing with the art in them, and his ability to control daylight has become near-legendary. Now the idiosyncrasies of museum expansion make it more difficult for the architect to live up to this standard.
The recently opened Morgan Library and Museum in New York, with Beyer Blinder Belle as executive architect, and shortly before it the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, with Lord, Aeck & Sargent [RECORD, November 2005, page 130], are the first two major museum expansions by the Renzo Piano Building Workshop. The two projects demonstrate how varied the intentions for such undertakings can be, and consequently how different the results.
The Morgan trustees wanted the same kind of popular facilities currently favored by large, public museums, which in its case ended up occupying 75,000 square feet and costing $106 million. In order to add a 280-seat auditorium, new storage vaults, more galleries, a new reading room, an enlarged store, a cafe, and a fancy restaurant, far too much was crammed into this tight, 42,314-square-foot site. Considering the trustees' reluctance to build a tower, Piano tackled the problem by excavating 65 feet below ground for the auditorium and new state-of-the-art storage. Above ground, Beyer Blinder Belle handled restorations and renovations; Piano executed the additions with his usual elegance, but in the process turned this historic house museum into a conventional, purpose-built museum.
In Atlanta, Piano responded to the High's request for an additional 177,000 square feet of galleries for contemporary art next to Richard Meier's 1983 Modernist building by producing a handsome new cultural campus at a cost of $110 million. Piano's two pavilions for art and one for administration maintained, even strengthened, the High's identity.
In both cities, Piano linked new glass-and-steel structures with existing architecture, in each case reoriented around a central piazza. For both he used similarly scaled, rectangular, off-white metal panels for cladding. The material is an ideal complement to Meier's square, baked-enamel panels. It makes a less perfect marriage with the...