Favored Museum Designer Wears Out His Welcome

Article by James S. Russell from Bloomberg News

Feb. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Forget the Bilbao Effect. It's not Frank Gehry who has ridden the U.S. museum-building boom, it's Renzo Piano.

When a new addition to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art opens next week, you won't see Gehry's fluttering sheets of titanium, though his office is less than 10 miles away. You'll see Piano's signature buff travertine walls and floating glass and metal roofs. He manages his museum-design empire from offices in Genoa, Italy, and Paris.

Consider this roll call: the Morgan Library and Museum and the Whitney Museum in New York; Harvard's museums and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in the Boston area; the High Museum in Atlanta; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Nasher Sculpture Center and Kimbell Art Museum in Texas; the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. He's got (or had) them all.

No architect has ever dominated the design of great civic institutions as Piano now does, not even in the ``City Beautiful'' museum-building frenzy of a century ago.

The American Institute of Architects just gave its gold medal to -- who else? He's wrapped up a tower for the New York Times and has just started sketching an arts complex for Columbia University. It's time for timid trustees to give Renzo a rest.

Why does everybody love Renzo? Start with his 1986 Menil Collection in Houston. S-shaped light scoops flood high, dark- wood-floored galleries with gorgeous light. Lush glass-walled gardens gently interrupt the visitor flow. Its refreshing informality reflects the taste and acumen of its benefactor, Dominique de Menil.

Buried by Bilbao

With Piano's 1995 Twombly Gallery, the Menil is an ensemble found on most museum directors' 10 Best lists. The same executives flock to Piano's serenely elegant Beyeler Foundation Museum outside Basel, Switzerland. It opened the same month in 1997 as Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain but got buried by the ballyhoo.

In these buildings, Piano expertly choreographed materials into a ballet of tension and repose, texture and weight, solidity and transparency in stone, metal and glass. The art looks great because of a judicious melding of daylight and gallery lighting.

Yet too many risk-averse boards run to Renzo asking him to recycle these masterpieces for them. They are shortchanging themselves and their collections.

As the 70-year-old Piano takes on more projects, what once seemed special now looks rote in Atlanta's High Museum and the thankfully canceled addition to New York's Whitney Museum. (Piano will reveal designs this spring for a downtown Whitney branch in Manhattan's gallery-crammed meatpacking district.)

In another example, should the Morgan Library have spent $102 million on an addition that puts a cafe, rather than the art collection, at center stage?

Chicago Addition

In design drawings, the modern art wing that Piano designed for the Art Institute of Chicago resembles three Beyelers stacked atop each other. Will the aloof, elegant structure transcend its model to reveal the Art Institute anew and engage an urban setting that's got everything -- skyline, park, lake? We'll find out in May 2009, when the wing opens.

Piano has benefited from a trend away from sculpturally expressive museums to bland designs that are invariably described as ``architecture serving art.'' It's true that spectacular atriums and strangely shaped galleries can make displaying art more difficult. Yet the best of them freshen our vision.

Not a Household Name

The Bloch Building at Kansas City's Nelson-Atkins Museum, with its dreamlike wandering path periodically splashed with limpid pools of light, takes direct aim at the tyranny of the white-box gallery. It gorgeously enhances the museum-viewing experience. Its architect, Steven Holl of New York, hasn't won the Pritzker Prize or become a household name.

Too few museums undertake a deep inquiry that combines an insightful designer with museum leadership that knows what it wants. Whether a design is subdued or extroverted will emerge from an open-minded consideration of growth that teases out what's unique about the collections, setting and city.

A kind of false prudence these days pushes trustees toward predictable designers and dull boxes that wrap cheerless white rooms. Too often the result saps art and visitors of vitality. With look-alike museums displaying the same parade of modern and contemporary hit makers, you can quickly lose track of whether you are in Bonn or Boston.

(James S. Russell is Bloomberg's U.S. architecture critic. The opinions expressed are his own.)