The 67-year-old Italian, whose firm is based in Genoa and Paris, is a bona fide design-world celebrity — regarded in some quarters as the most talented museum architect since Louis Kahn and the winner six years ago of the Pritzker Prize, the field's Nobel.

The Museum world has come to expect that the new museums will be memorable, if not jaw-dropping, but Renzo uses the physical architecture not to dazzle, but for it to generate dazzling orchestrations of scale and light.

Piano has proven much better than his famous peers at keeping budgets and his ego in check. And even his most visually impressive buildings are marked more by precision than experimentation.

Piano has excelled at mastering "dilemmas" in the more difficult field of Expansions and Renovations of Museums, as opposed to the New.

Artful yet sensible, Italian architect Renzo Piano's ideas
are a natural draw for museum boards.

Los Angeles Times
By Christopher Hawthorne
Times Staff Writer
Dec 26 2004

There's one simple way to explain why Renzo Piano is at work on a remarkable six art museums in the U.S. alone: Architecturally speaking, he offers museum directors and trustees a rare chance to have their cake and eat it too.

The 67-year-old Italian, whose firm is based in Genoa and Paris, is a bona fide design-world celebrity — regarded in some quarters as the most talented museum architect since Louis Kahn and the winner six years ago of the Pritzker Prize, the field's Nobel. In an age in which museum boards understandably worry they won't be able to raise money for a building project without a big name attached, Piano's is one of the biggest.

Over the last decade, the public has also come to expect that the physical space of new museums will be memorable, if not jaw-dropping. And though he is hardly a showman, many of Piano's museum projects, from Basel to Houston, feature dazzling orchestrations of scale and light.

At the same time, the architect has proven to be much better than his famous peers at keeping budgets and his ego in check. He's urbane and approachable and speaks without jargon. And even his most visually impressive buildings are marked more by precision than experimentation. (His free-spirited 1977 debut with then-partner Richard Rogers, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, has thus proved an anomaly.) These days, potential clients think of him as a known quantity.

As a result, some critics charge that his famous charm is at least partly calculated and that he's too easily persuaded to compromise his architectural vision — or even that he lacks one altogether. There is something to these complaints; if every architect were as pragmatic as Piano, I would frankly be worried about the profession's ability to break new aesthetic ground. Architecture needs its radicals, to be sure. But after nearly a decade of museum architecture in which flamboyance became a kind of competitive sport, we were more than ready for the corrective that Piano provides.

It's worth noting too that all of Piano's art museum jobs in this country are expansions or renovations. The museums that have hired him, from New York's Morgan Library and Whitney Museum to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, face the dilemma of adding either to existing buildings with strong architectural personalities or to a collection of wings that has grown up in ad hoc fashion over the decades. The clarity of his work, and his ability to acknowledge architectural context without resorting to imitation or kitsch, make him a natural candidate for jobs like those.

At the Whitney Museum and LACMA, Piano was brought on board only after a plan by Rem Koolhaas' Office for Metropolitan Architecture was approved and then rejected as too expensive or complicated. If you were casting somebody to play Piano's foil, you couldn't do better than Koolhaas, who can be aloof or sharply superior where Piano is reliably politic. Their differences have been plain to see at LACMA. For all practical purposes, OMA's design would have razed the museum's existing buildings and erected a striking, translucent tent-like structure in their place. At the time, Koolhaas said he considered it a "moral imperative" to start from scratch and give the museum a bold new form. LACMA officials eventually concluded that the moral imperative would cost them roughly $300 million and decided to pull the plug.

Piano's replacement scheme adds one new building, for contemporary art, along Wilshire Boulevard, and uses new walkways and fabric scrims over the older buildings to give the site stronger axes and visual unity. It also offers LACMA the chance to build in phases and to avoid having to placate donors whose names are attached to the older buildings, which would have disappeared had Koolhaas had his way. Both Eli Broad, the LACMA trustee who flew to Europe to court Piano, and museum Director Andrea Rich have praised Piano as a "weaver." It's hard to imagine anyone describing Koolhaas that way.

Diversity in design

Of course, even fans of Piano may worry that with so many museum projects in the works he'll wind up single-handedly dragging the museum-architecture pendulum too far back in the direction of accommodation and restraint. But there are a couple of points to remember along those lines. One is that Piano rarely repeats himself: Though much of his work is marked by a recognizable formal rigor — no line, no vista, no beam out of place — and the juxtaposition of sleek lines with rough-hewn materials, his portfolio is unusually varied. It's hard to believe at first, for example, that an airy, weightless-looking skyscraper in the works for the New York Times, the sprawling Kansai Airport in Japan and the eggshell-shaped husks that make up the Tjibaou Cultural Center in New Caledonia could be the work of a single firm. That means six museums by Piano will offer a much richer architectural range than six museums by Daniel Libeskind, or Zaha Hadid, or Norman Foster.

On top of that, American museums are in the midst of an unprecedented growth spurt, just now building the extensions that the boom years of the 1990s allowed them to plan. That boom has not been a good thing for art museums, on balance. It has created a frenzied atmosphere in which arts institutions, convinced that only by making a grand architectural statement can they stay competitive, build oversized (and often overpriced) new homes at the expense of other priorities. But it has certainly been good for museum architects.

Indeed, the talented architects not named Renzo Piano who are working on one or more museums in this country include Libeskind, Foster, Mexico's Ricardo Legorreta, Britain's David Adjaye, Michael Maltzan, the Norwegian firm Snøhetta, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio , Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron of Switzerland, Brad Cloepfil and, of course, Frank Gehry. The list goes on (and on), but you get the point.

Piano may be leading the museum-architecture pack. At least for now, though, there's no shortage of work to go around.

Christopher Hawthorne is The Times' architecture critic.

Building his cultural legacy
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