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Renzo Piano gets museum airborne

Special section: The Gardner Grows

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

January 15, 2012|By Joseph P. Kahn

Before architect Renzo Piano and his team drew up plans for their addition to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, they spent months listening to museum staffers discuss the existing building, known as the palace - both its charms and its limitations. Only then, says Piano, a Pritzker Prize winner whose firm has designed and renovated art museums around the world, did they address the Gardner’s major needs and concerns: from the soundly practical to the purely aesthetic; from how the museum has functioned for more than a century to how it might thrive for another century or two.

“The palace is a palace, a brick building. It’s not where the magic is,’’ Piano reflected on a recent visit.

“The magic is when you get inside,’’ said the 74-year-old Italian architect, whose English is superb, if heavily accented. “What is the suspended atmosphere of the [palace’s interior] courtyard if not lightness? That sense of levitation, of zero gravity.’’

From a terrace overlooking the new addition, Piano betrayed an almost childlike delight in the view of his 70,000-square-foot addition - a structure slightly larger than Gardner’s original. Cultural buildings like the one he’s just added to the museum’s footprint enrich their cities, Piano said, summarizing a design concept that seeks to fully integrate the two edifices, old and new. “They’re not buildings that take possession of the land. They fly on the land. They welcome people. You look for lightness, and you get transparency. You build transparency, and you get accessibility.’’

Behind the $114 million addition’s facades of glass and patinated copper are a gallery for special exhibitions, a performance center, offices, public rooms, conservation labs, and greenhouses. The new visitors’ entrance opens onto a lobby that’s visible through glass walls from the street.

The project’s aesthetic approach is informed by multiple sources, according to the architect, whose Renzo Piano Building Workshop maintains offices in Paris, New York, and Genoa, Italy.

“It comes from Isabella Gardner,’’ he said. “It comes from my personal story. It comes from a social vision of a cultural building that has a duty to create that sense of attraction.’’

Piano’s team has also designed The New York Times headquarters in Manhattan, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, San Francisco’s California Academy of Sciences, and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, among other buildings of architectural distinction. Current projects include a renovation and expansion of the Harvard Art Museums, a major addition to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, and a new downtown Manhattan home for the Whitney Museum of American Art.