NEWS ANALYSIS : Newport’s Rejection of an Architect’s Vision : Design: The choice of avant-gardist Renzo Piano to shape the Newport Harbor Art Museum was hailed in 1988. Then he was replaced by a N.Y. firm.

In October, 1988, when noted Italian avant-garde architect Renzo Piano was chosen to design the proposed Newport Harbor Art Museum, the museum’s reception was enthusiastic.

M. Rogue Hemley, then-chairman of the museum board (now chair of the museum’s building campaign), said the Genoa-born architect was chosen “for his interface with technology and architecture. We were impressed with his ability to introduce technology with the use of natural light and a very scientific approach to architecture.”

Why, then, was Piano’s design finally rejected by the museum’s board? And why was the internationally respected architect summarily replaced by the more conventional New York-based firm of Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates?

“Perhaps, when it came right down to it, Piano was just too radical for Newport to swallow,” suggested Santa Monica architect Michael Rotondi.

Rotondi, dean of the Southern California Institute of Architecture and a principal of the avant-garde firm Morphosis, compared Piano’s “imaginative inventiveness” with KPF’s “regressive conventionality, which echoes the ethos of the captains of capitalism, such as Irvine Co. Chairman Donald Bren, the major power on the museum’s board of trustees.”

Co-designer of the Pompidou Center in Paris and architect of the acclaimed Menil Museum in Houston, Piano was awarded the prestigious 1989 Gold Medal by the Royal Institute of British Architects. He runs studio-offices in Genoa and Paris, and his current commissions span the globe.

In the 1980s Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates emerged as one of the leading commercial architectural practices in the United States. Capitalizing on the new corporate fashion for Postmodern high-rise office complexes, KPF added to the skylines of many cities. In Los Angeles the firm designed the much-criticized Coast Saving Building on Wilshire Boulevard--a funnel-shaped profile that looms over the Harbor Freeway.

It was Bren who first turned to KPF partner William Pedersen for an alternative to Piano’s inventive design for the museum.

“Bren offered to pay Pedersen to prepare an alternative design out of his own pocket in the second half of 1989,” said museum trustee James V. Selna. “This was in response to the board’s concern that a cost analysis revealed that Piano’s design was beyond our budget, plus a feeling that the concept was too inflexible for our needs.”

Piano was asked to revise his design, which Selna admitted the Genoa-based architect was “very willing to do.” At the same time--and without informing Piano that he was now in virtual competition with KPF--Bren was paying Pedersen to come up with a scheme the board could compare with the original. Pedersen informed Piano in March of his alternative plans.

Architects are all-too-often replaced in mid-stream, Rotondi declared. Describing a recent occasion in which Morphosis was replaced by more conventional architects in the design of the proposed expansion of Princeton’s School of Philosophy, he said, “Conservative forces on the Princeton building committee were unhappy with our concept, so they dismissed us after we’d done a lot of work.”

“Architects get (mistreated) in this or similar fashion all the time,” said Hollywood architect Barton Myers, who says he has several times lost out on major commissions after putting in a great deal of time and effort.

The relationship between an architect and his client is like a marriage, Myers said. “Sometimes you find you got into bed with the wrong person. What matters then is how gracefully the partners extricate themselves from this awkward and embarrassing situation.”

Both Myers and Rotondi, along with several other architects interviewed, rejected the museum’s public statement that Piano was dismissed because his design was inflexible. The professionals labled it a “lame excuse” and their comments ranged from “cowardly” to “outright hogwash.”

Piano has been unavailable for reaction, but his comments from an April, 1989, interview with The Times serve as an appropriate response to the proceedings.

“Memory is the basis of all architecture,” he said. “Not as sentimental nostalgias for a mythical past . . . but as a treasure house of shared experiences architecture may spend to enrich its language.”