Morgan Library Museum Unveils Renzo Piano Design

McKim's library, says architectural historian Christopher Gray, is "one of the signature buildings of his career, a magnificently discreet single-story facade of Tennessee marble with an inset loggia." Its impenetrable appearance was in part accomplished by stacking the blocks without mortar, so that not so much as a knife blade could be inserted between the stones. Completed in 1906, the library - "icy and exquisite," as The Architectural Review described it - was, and remains, an incomparable trove housing everything from ancient Egyptian artifacts to drawings by William Blake.

By the late 1990s, the Morgan Library had once again outgrown its space, but, given the realities of Midtown Manhattan real estate, the possibilities for its expansion were extremely limited. Having resolved to build, the director and trustees invited 24 architects to compete for the commission.

"At the end of the competition, we didn't feel that we'd found the right person. At that point we turned to Renzo Piano, who had initially declined to compete but offered to speak to us if we wished. By early fall of 2000, we had hired him," Pierce recalls. The architect's Paris-based firm, Renzo Piano Building Workshop, turned to New York-based Beyer Blinder Belle, preservation-minded architects known for their sensitive renovation of Grand Central Station, to be the executive architect on site.

A builder's son from Genoa, Italy, Piano attracted notice in 1977 when he designed Paris's flamboyant Pompidou Centre with English architect Richard Rogers. Though Piano later won architecture's highest honor, the Pritzker Prize, in 1998, he remains something of an unknown among the general public, in part because he is more interested in crafting an individualized response to each setting than branding his buildings worldwide with an instantly recognizable signature.

"Piano designs elegant, beautiful buildings that are very much of their time, yet sensitive to their context. He renders details in a very refined way," says Pierce, who had especially admired the architect's work for the Menil Collection in Houston and the Museum of the Beyeler Foundation in Basel.

In the case of the Morgan Library, Piano's challenge was to integrate the three existing historic structures - the 1852 brownstone, the 1906 McKim library and the 1928 annex - into an innovative, contemporary response. In resolving his dilemma, Piano imagined an Italian village that had evolved over time in an organic, harmonious but hardly uniform way. His solution was to create three intimately scaled pavilions, one each facing north, west and south. The smallest of the three structures is a 20-foot cube; the largest, which opens onto Madison Avenue, provides a new entrance for the museum and a central court that the architect conceived as a communal gathering and likens to an Italian piazza.

For building materials, Piano chose faceted steel panels painted to match the rosy marble of McKim's library and extra-wide glass, which the architect compares to crystal. Many of the interior walls are cloaked in cherry. Floors are oak. Says Piano, "These are honest materials that create the right sense of strength and clarity between old and new, as well as a sense of transparency in the center of the institution that opens the campus up to the street."

Ingeniously, more than half of the 151,000-square-foot complex is now below ground. New facilities include the glass-enclosed central court, a 280-seat performance hall, a naturally lit reading room, collections storage in an underground vault, administrative offices and visitor amenities, such as two new cafés and a gift shop. Both the central pavilion and the annex's old reading room provide gallery space.

The luminosity of the new interiors, in contrast to the muted solemnity of financier's original retreat, are characteristic of much of Piano's work. Writing about the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Brenda Goodman of The New York Times observed, "...the Italian architect Renzo Piano works with light...It is the kind of light that makes colors pop and wood glow. It is the kind of light that makes paint look magical."

As the Morgan Library reopens to the public for the first time in three years, it is with suitable gaiety. Visitors look forward to a weeklong series of inaugural lectures, concerts and performances. A series of opening displays will highlight the Morgan Library's renowned strengths in European drawings; medieval and Renaissance manuscripts; printed books and bindings; ancient Near Eastern seals dating from 3500 to 330 BC; literary and historical manuscripts by major European and American authors, artists, scientists and historical figures; and music manuscripts, including works by Mozart, Richard Strauss, Beethoven and Ives. There will even be a display of drawings, models and photographs documenting the Morgan Library-Renzo Piano collaboration from initial concept to finished scheme.

"We're trying to remind people of some of the extraordinary things that we have. We're doing it in a way that we hope people will find interesting and appealing," Pierce explains.

The library study was the favorite room of the man who was the foremost collector of his time; a man who, between 1890 and 1913, spent half his fortune on art and on his death willed his $200 million collection to the public. "Here," wrote Ross, "his thick eyebrows relaxed over his finds; here he occasionally called together the inner financial circle whose gathering in Wall Street would have caused conjectures; here, in 1913, Morgan's body was brought from Rome to rest for three days before the burial in Hartford." With its reopening, the Morgan Library hopes a much broader audience will find similar satisfaction.

For information, 212-590-0300 or www.morganlibrary.org.