By looking at Genovese based Renzo Piano's schedule, one would get the idea that proposed Museums can't take the chance of hiring any other architect.

Piano has designed two American museums, both in Texas (Houston's 1987 Menil, and the 2003 Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas), and now he is building or designing additions to six more, in almost every corner of the country — Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Atlanta and Boston.

Atlanta's High Museum of Art, will be finished soon (fall 2005 is the High's expected opening date). Others, like the plan announced this month to build an addition to Boston's masterpiece of late-Victorian aesthetic taste, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, are barely on the drawing board. Most are at differing stages.

In addition to Boston and Atlanta, there are New York's patrician Morgan Library and erratic Whitney Museum of American Art, the imposing Art Institute of Chicago and the quasi-public, quasi-private hybrid that will be the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA.

Two of his projects outside the US were The Centre Georges Pompidou, which opened in Paris in 1977, is his most striking and controversial, and the widely admired 1997 Beyeler Foundation museum in Basel, Switzerland.

CRITICS' NOTEBOOKS
THE UBIQUITOUS MR. PIANO
Sure, he's great at what he does, but can't anyone else design a bankable museum?
Los Angeles Times
By Christopher Knight
Times Staff Writer
Dec 26 2004

As ambitious art museums across the United States become more homogenized, each aspiring to acquire virtually the same collections and mount the same exhibition programs as every other, the timidity regularly emanating from their executive suites only escalates. The most recent example can be cited in two words: Renzo Piano.

The Italian architect is among the most gifted and poetic designers working today. He's a great architect, but judging from current museum leadership you'll be forgiven for thinking Piano is also the only architect.

Piano has designed two American museums, both in Texas. Now he is building or designing additions to six more, in almost every corner of the country — Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Atlanta and Boston.

A few, such as the expanded campus for Atlanta's High Museum of Art, will be finished soon (fall 2005 is the High's expected opening date). Others, like the plan announced this month to build an addition to Boston's masterpiece of late-Victorian aesthetic taste, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, are barely on the drawing board. Most are at differing stages of what is necessarily a lengthy and complicated process.

Whatever the case, it appears museums don't just want the same artists and the same exhibitions. They want the same buildings too.

When Piano and his Genoese firm, Building Workshop, are done with all these projects in the next decade or so, no other contemporary architect will have had as extensive and lasting an impact on what Americans think of as art's optimum museum environment.

There is irony in this. Piano became internationally famous as half of the team that designed one of the 20th century's worst buildings for art.

Make no mistake: The Centre Georges Pompidou, which opened in Paris in 1977, is extraordinary architecture. In essence Piano and his collaborator, Richard Rogers, turned a traditional modern building inside out. Creating an exoskeleton composed from the building's internal structural functions meant that space inside could be wide open and flexible to accommodate a diverse program that includes a museum of modern art, a reference library, centers for industrial design and music and the usual restaurants and shops. But the cavernous gallery spaces that resulted are notoriously inhospitable for looking at art — even after attempts at renovation.

Happily, the Pompidou is quite unlike anything Piano has built since. And even though it's an awful art museum space, it also must be said that the architect went on to design one of the loveliest, most commodious museums anywhere.

Houston's 1987 Menil Collection is a marvel. Its fusion of contemplative galleries, interior atrium gardens and natural light has put the gray clapboard and white steel building on many an art lover's short list of cherished places, mine included. The Menil building shows Piano understands that intimacy is what drives the most satisfying art experiences.

The Menil's breathtaking success inspired the old Newport Harbor Art Museum (now the Orange County Museum of Art) to hire Piano to design a building for a 10-acre site in Irvine. But that plan foundered in 1992 amid trustees' fears that the galleries would be too small and the price too high, especially at a time of intractable economic recession.

Getting from there to here

This is a brief history of Piano's early museum work. It is worth recounting because it contains most of the seeds for his flowering as America's art museum architect of choice.

The Centre Pompidou was the first post-1960s example of an iconic art museum — an eye-popping modern edifice that grabs international headlines, draws tourists and spurs urban redevelopment in a depressed neighborhood.

Subsequent fiascoes such as the Milwaukee Museum's hugely over-budget 2001 building by Santiago Calatrava, which nearly bankrupted the institution, and the aborted recent attempt to build Rem Koolhaas' remarkable rethinking of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art show a less-sanguine potential for the art-museum-as-icon.

Despite such successes as Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron's Tate Modern in London, a certain exhaustion has set in on chasing that elusive dream, in which the display of art is only one of many practical goals.

To those who face the daunting task of construction, when a new museum building can require raising $100 million or more, a levelheaded image is appealing. Piano's history offers a degree of comfort that, say, Koolhaas' does not engender. Piano is a founding father of the icon archetype who turned away from it. Surely he now represents sobriety to museum directors and trustees.

International standing mixed with an aura of safety creates a powerful magnet. It is especially potent when coupled with a track record that includes, in addition to the Menil, the widely admired 1997 Beyeler Foundation museum in Basel, Switzerland, and the 2003 Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas.

These three art museums, all relatively small, have something else in common besides the architect. They were designed for the same sort of client — wealthy private art collectors with a lifetime of experience and the capacity to work with Piano one on one.

The architect is only part of the equation in commissioning significant architecture. The sensitivity of the client is critical. Piano's current museum projects represent a wide range of patrons. In addition to Boston and Atlanta, there are New York's patrician Morgan Library and erratic Whitney Museum of American Art, the imposing Art Institute of Chicago and the quasi-public, quasi-private hybrid that will be the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA.

For many of these venues the aim seems to be the opposite of what inspired the late Dominique de Menil in choosing Piano to build the Houston museum. The Menil Collection numbers some 15,000 paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, photographs and rare books — mostly modern but encompassing antiquity, the Middle Ages and tribal cultures of Africa, Oceana and the Pacific Northwest. By design, however, only a small fraction of those holdings are on view at one time.

By contrast, a more-is-better philosophy often drives art museum expansion, with foolish laments that most of the collection remains in storage. But more-is-better is not what you find at the Menil. Nor does it describe the Beyeler or the Nasher. There, the quality of the art experience trumps the quantity. Aesthetic depth is more important than the shallow pleasures of cultural tourism. Moralizing education withers before a dedication to enchantment.

"A museum should be a place where we lose our head," Menil said when hers opened, quoting the French Dominican priest and scholar of sacred art Marie-Alain Couturier. Piano has designed three art museums where "losing your head" is possible. Here's hoping he — and his patrons — can make six more.

Christopher Knight is The Times' art critic.

The ubiquitous Mr. Piano
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