Morgan Library Museum Unveils Renzo Piano Design

NEW YORK CITY

:In 1932, Malcolm Ross wrote in The New Yorker that only 20 years before, when Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) was still alive, it was generally surmised that one of the world's great collections of manuscripts and rare books was hidden away in the financier's austerely grand renaissance palazzo-style library on East 36th Street between Madison and Park Avenues. Still, few had actually seen the hoard and only one journalist, as far as Ross knew, had begun to describe its riches.

Even after the collector's son, J.P. Morgan Jr (1867-1943), called Jack, presented Mr Morgan's Library, as it was called, to the American public in 1924, access was limited. "A qualified visitor," Ross explained, "must be more than 21 years old, not an undergraduate and must have credentials showing why he is ready for literary research of the rarified sort."

With the debut of its $106 million addition on April 29, the 82-year-old institution - whose 350,000-piece collection remains one of the great assemblages of Western history, art and literature - enters a new era as a museum, historic landmark and research center.

The project, the largest in the library's history, nearly doubles the square footage of the complex, which occupies the entire block along the east side of Madison Avenue from 36th Street to 37th Street. In designing three sun-filled steel and glass pavilions to connect the museum's trio of existing structures, Italian architect Renzo Piano literally plucked the Morgan Library, with its opaque facade and brooding demeanor, out of its revivalist past and placed it in a contemporary light that visitors are meant to find both welcoming and uplifting.

The man who oversaw the project is Charles E. Pierce Jr, the library's director since 1987. In his nearly 20-year tenure, Pierce has presided over several smaller improvements, including the addition of the Thaw Conservation Center. Museum trustees - working closely with Pierce; the library's deputy director, Brian Regan; and the museum's president, S. Parker Gilbert - have raised all but $3 million toward the most recent construction and renovation. Another $25 million is sought for an endowment.

Pierce, who earned his doctorate in British literature at Harvard and previously taught at Vassar, joined the Morgan Library not long after the museum bought back the third structure in its original, triangular campus. Once described as a "great sun-browned dowager of a building," the 1852 brownstone at Madison and 37th Street was built for banker Anson Phelps Stokes. Pierpont Morgan bought the house and gave it to his son just after the turn of the century. After Jack Morgan's death in 1943, No. 231 Madison was acquired by the Lutherans, who owned it for nearly four decades.

Pierpont Morgan himself lived in a nearly identical brownstone just south of his son, at No. 219 Madison. After his father's death, Jack Morgan demolished No. 219, putting in its place in 1928 the Benjamin Wistar Morris-designed annex that for years served as the Morgan Library's main entrance, art gallery and reading room.

One night in March 1902, as Jean Strouse, author of Morgan: American Financier, recounts, Pierpont Morgan telephoned Charles Follen McKim, the lead partner in McKim, Mead & White and the foremost advocate of renaissance-style architecture in the United States. Over breakfast the next morning, Morgan commissioned McKim to create his great private library on East 36th Street, next door to his own home.