Sense of transparency

THE Italian architect Renzo Piano is in the process of rewriting the book on American museum architecture. Well, it might be more accurate to say he’s rewriting the book on museum expansions: His firm, Renzo Piano Building Workshop, has additions in the works at a remarkable number of the most prominent museums in the country, including the Whitney in New York, the Gardner in Boston and the Art Institute of Chicago. And, of course, there’s his reconfiguration of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and its muddled collection of buildings along Wilshire Boulevard, the first phase of which will open in 2007.

The progress of Piano’s museum commissions is being closely watched in art and architecture circles. The first of the batch to be finished is a $109-million, 177,000-square-foot addition to Richard Meier’s High Museum of Art, Atlanta’s sole landmark of postwar architecture. It opens Saturday.

The High, a pure white and highly sculptural design completed in the fall of 1983, helped make Meier’s international reputation -- it opened when he was 49 -- and kicked off the infatuation with iconic buildings and big-name architects that now holds American museum boards in a tighter grip than ever. The High has long seemed typical of postwar museums by well-known architects in this country, in the sense that it is a beautiful and provocative building that has never been very satisfying as a place to look at art. Its galleries are small and low-ceilinged by contemporary standards, and are particularly ill-suited for the large-scale installation work that has become common in the last few decades.

The new High, which adds three separate gallery buildings connected to the Meier wing and to one another by glass-enclosed walkways, is not likely to please those who find Piano’s work overly restrained. Nor will it end the debate about whether his unprecedented run of recent U.S. commissions represents a larger turn toward conservatism in museum architecture.

Indeed, Piano’s design in Atlanta is nothing if not polite to Meier: It matches the scale of the original, its generous use of glass and its signature shade of white. (Meier’s exterior is enamel, while Piano uses painted aluminum panels.) And it leaves the High’s front facade untouched: If you approach the museum from Peachtree Street, its traditional frontyard, you see remarkably little of the extensive square footage that Piano has added toward the back. Along with a renovation of the older building that was completed two years ago -- and has left its 135,000 square feet of space looking better than ever -- Piano’s deferential approach helps soften the indignity for Meier of watching from the sidelines as a rival redesigns one of his best-known buildings.

But the new High also puts on impressive display all of the qualities that have made Piano and his firm, which is based in Genoa and Paris, so sought after. The design is modern in its forms and its detailing but classical in its sense of urbanism and proportion -- a combination that may not make for splashy or swooping forms but tends, at least in this architect’s hands, to produce unusually rich experiential architecture. The High’s new galleries -- particularly the ones on the top floor, which are bathed in natural light filtered through an unusually effective skylight system -- are an absolute joy to walk through.

It is hard to think of another American example where connected buildings by two prominent architects get along so well. Too often in this country we have thought about expansions of well-known buildings as an either-or proposition: You can either put up an addition that echoes the forms of what’s already there, or you can try something aggressively new. Piano has used the Atlanta commission to suggest a Clintonian third way, an approach that covers crisp, generously modern spaces in a cloak of serene accommodation. The result might seem overly, even dispiritingly safe if it weren’t so assuredly executed in terms of scale, material and manipulation of light. It’s in this last category that the design impresses most. Piano has experimented with natural light in three earlier museums: the Menil Collection in Houston (1986), the Beyeler Foundation Museum in Switzerland (1997) and the 2-year-old Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. At the High he has done so to nearly sublime effect: The quality of light in the new top-floor galleries, which for the most part hold postwar art and sculpture, is unusually fine.

The effect is achieved through a system of “light scoops.” A thousand of them stick up about 7 feet from the roof of the museum. They collect sunlight from the north, which is less damaging to artworks than intense southern light, and filter it before delivering it into the galleries.

Because Piano’s museum neatly matches the grid of the Atlanta streets, and because that grid is not laid out on a precise north-south-east-west axis, to capture direct northern light the scoops have to twist a few degrees, like flowers bending toward the sun. Piano uses this twisting motion as a signature form for the entire project: If you look at his new gallery buildings from the outside, mostly what you see is a flat wall covered with white metal panels. But at the very top, those panels curve up and out, stretching and turning to provide the covering for the light wells on the roof.

Piano uses that subtle twist to make a significant, even polemical point about his architecture: He is not interested in jaw-dropping exterior displays of form-making but, instead, is saving his most dramatic effects for the interior of the building -- specifically, for the spaces that display art. This is something of a gamble in an age of splashy museum architecture. But once you walk off the elevator and into the thrilling upper galleries, it begins to seem rather churlish to fault Piano for draping the exterior in conservative dress.

And it’s important to note that in general, though Piano’s buildings at the High may have a certain resemblance to Meier’s museum -- seen out of the corner of the eye, they could be by the same architect -- they also possess their own distinct and quietly contemporary personality. All three of the new gallery buildings, which are attached in an L-shaped form to what had been the back of Meier’s museum, have a ground floor enclosed entirely in glass, so that they appear to float; that gesture lends the whole addition a distinctly Modernist sense of lightness and transparency. And where Meier’s building is something of an architectural essay on vertical circulation, with its four floors of galleries connected by a fan-shaped ramp suspended under a huge skylight, Piano’s addition makes a point of emphasizing horizontal connections.

Perhaps just as important, at least for Piano’s client in this case, he has managed to turn what had been an isolated architectural icon into a connected campus of buildings. This is no small feat in a city in love with the private automobile and where, much like Los Angeles, well-designed outdoor public spaces are rare. Piano has carefully arranged his gallery buildings and a restaurant so that they define and enclose a handsome new plaza.

Sorry -- a handsome piazza. Officials at the High, from the publicists all the way up to the director, former LACMA head Michael Shapiro, seem to have committed a memo on this subject to memory: They would really rather you use the Italian word to describe the new outdoor space that Piano has created. Even the architect himself visibly cringes when he hears the word plaza, so vanilla and so utterly American, applied to his Atlanta design.

There is more to the piazza/plaza question than mere semantics. It gets to the heart of at least one reason American museums have found Piano and his firm so beguilingly attractive as potential saviors. What Piano is selling, beyond the luxury of additional and more flexible exhibition space, is a sense of sophistication and instant tradition; what he promises to deliver to U.S. cities is a little urbane pocket of Europe, a place where you can look at art for a couple of hours and then sit outside sipping an espresso and trying to keep your grandchildren from climbing on the Oldenburg sculpture -- all without having to struggle to pronounce any funny-sounding words, puzzle over newfangled architectural forms or change dollars to euros.

That’s the goal along Wilshire Boulevard, where Piano is rethinking the LACMA campus, in much the same way it has been at the High. And no single word, in any language, sums up that enviable atmosphere better than “piazza,” with its echoes of tourist-route staples like the sloping square in Siena and Michelangelo’s Campidoglio in Rome. The attraction of that atmosphere has proved strong for Atlanta, which despite landing the Summer Olympics in 1996 still suffers from deep anxiety about being stuck on the second tier of American cities. Even the city’s champions often complain that it remains a provincial place.

In truth, Piano’s outdoor gathering space, though beautifully proportioned and landscaped, is hardly sizable enough to rise to the level of modest public square. But if Atlantans have fallen in love with the idea of a piazza on Peachtree Street, Renzo Piano, for one, is hardly going to object.