THE NEW MORGAN

Renzo Piano comes from a family of builders in Genoa, and his firm is called Renzo Piano Building Workshop, as if he weren’t a superstar architect but just your friendly neighborhood problem solver. Unlike most other architectural stars, Piano has no signature style. Instead, his work is characterized by a genius for balance and context, an ability to establish inventive correspondences between his buildings and those that surround them. Until now, New York hasn’t had a building by Piano, but his expansion of the Morgan Library, which has just reopened as the Morgan Library & Museum, is the beachhead for what may become a significant presence in the city. A skyscraper that will serve as the new headquarters for the Times is nearing completion, and Piano’s addition to the Whitney Museum of American Art is expected to begin construction within the next two years.
Piano’s achievement at the Morgan is to have created a satisfying composition out of three not particularly compatible landmark structures. The old Morgan buildings are awkwardly placed around the intersection of Thirty-sixth Street and Madison Avenue. The best of them, a dazzling Renaissance palazzo that Charles F. McKim designed as J. P. Morgan’s personal library in 1906, is tucked away on Thirty-sixth Street. A dull, classical annex next to it, erected by Benjamin W. Morris when the library was opened to the public, in the nineteen-twenties, has the choice location, on the corner, and north of this is a staid nineteenth-century brownstone. The challenge was to link these disparate buildings while also increasing the institution’s space by half. Piano’s solution is simultaneously subtle and radical. To avoid overwhelming the existing structures, he hid most of the new space underground, sinking storage vaults and a concert hall four stories into the bedrock. At ground level, an elegant glass-and-steel structure weaves between the older buildings and meets the street in two rectilinear façades, one on Madison Avenue and the other on Thirty-sixth Street.
Piano has reorganized everything so that the Madison Avenue façade is the new entrance, but it is from Thirty-sixth Street that you see most clearly how he has both preserved the Morgan and transformed it. The two limestone buildings, McKim’s palazzo and Morris’s annex, formerly tethered by a dreary connecting walkway, had an uncomfortable relationship with each other. Piano replaced the walkway with a compact steel cube painted a color that echoes the limestone. (Inside it is a gallery of medieval religious objects.) The cube is divided into eight ridged panels, to give it scale and texture, and it provides a firm counterweight to the mass of buildings on either side. It suggests that Piano is less concerned with form-making than he is with balancing masses, materials, and scales. I’d always found Morris’s annex bland, but now it seems crisply defined, while McKim’s opulent palazzo has acquired a new solidity, at no cost to its elegance.
Piano does something similar on Madison Avenue, but it is less effective. The limestone buildings on Thirty-sixth Street always had an innate competitive tension, but the austere side wall of the Morris annex and the grand old brownstone are two structures with little to say to each other, and they are separated by a wider gap. Piano fills the gap with an elongated version of his steel cube—which houses a new reading room—but the proportions aren’t as enticing as they are on Thirty-sixth Street. Below the reading room, the new entrance consists of glass doors stretching across the façade, an improvement over the cramped front door in the old annex, but still a little conventional.
Inside, however, the ingenuity of Piano’s conception becomes gloriously apparent. He has essentially created a piazza: a fifty-two-foot-high, glass-covered atrium in the middle of the complex, with access to all parts of the institution, new and old. Too often, when exterior walls of old buildings get turned into interior elements of stylish new spaces, they take on the precious air of stage sets. But Piano’s loose embrace of the other buildings is free of self-consciousness, and the result makes you think of one of those oddly shaped squares in Italian villages that feel so comfortable. He has done nothing to disguise the irregularity of the space, enhancing its casual ambience with a café off to one side and a couple of ficus trees sprouting through openings in the floor.
This is one of the greatest modern rooms in New York, not by virtue of grandeur or scale but because of the subtle links it establishes between the Morgan’s older buildings and the rest of the city. Piano’s piazza is defined by its complex sight lines around the rest of the collection and to the street outside. A glass wall at the east end of the piazza abuts the backs of brick apartment buildings, a jumble of ordinariness that here feels familiar and warm. You are connected to New York in this space, yet magically removed from it, as if in a garden. If you position yourself at the right point, near the center of the room, and look through the glass ceiling, you glimpse the top of the Empire State Building poking above a Madison Avenue office building.
When the Morgan hired Piano, in 2000, it had just rejected the work of the three distinguished architects it had invited to submit plans, each of whom proposed large new structures that risked overwhelming the older buildings. (A disclosure: I was an adviser to the Morgan during this competition.) Two of the schemes proposed towers where Piano has placed his court, and, as it happens, a tower is exactly what Piano has come up with for his redesign of the Whitney Museum, some forty blocks north on Madison. Here, too, he succeeded other distinguished architects—Piano’s ability to take on troubled projects is a testament to his versatile aesthetic—but the Whitney poses a very different set of challenges. Marcel Breuer’s inverted ziggurat is so assertive that nothing marries easily to it. Against its brooding dark granite, a treatment as gentle as Piano’s Morgan project would be all but invisible; conversely, previous proposals, by Michael Graves and, later, by Rem Koolhaas, would have loomed over the building and undermined its monolithic power. Piano’s solution again shows a mastery of balance, but in an entirely different way from the Morgan. He has proposed a squarish tower, sensibly set as far back from the existing structure as the rather tight lot allows. The design doesn’t compete with Breuer’s building, but there’s nothing timid about it. The plans—a nine-story tower sheathed in stainless-steel panels—promise a softly shimmering presence that will be the precise opposite of Breuer’s blunt block. The keynote is quiet assertiveness.
The drawbacks of Piano’s approach are becoming discernible, however, as his new headquarters for the Times, a fifty-two-story skyscraper, rises rapidly on Eighth Avenue. For skyscrapers, quiet assertiveness isn’t enough; once they get above street level, their job is not to balance other buildings but simply to be. The New York Times Building, which Piano has designed in collaboration with the New York firm of FXFowle, is a glass tower set behind a curtain of thin rods which form a sunscreen all the way up the façade. At seven hundred and forty-eight feet, that is a lot of rods. Up close, the tower has the pristine, tensile quality of Piano’s smaller work, but seen from a few blocks away the rods blur into something that looks like corrugated metal and the building takes on a strange, thin blandness. It’s one thing to design a tower that will play beautifully off the granite of the Whitney, but the Times building has to play off against a whole sky line. If the graceful interweaving of modernism and classicism at the Morgan demonstrates the power that brilliantly conceived, intense pieces of small-scale architecture can possess, the Times building, so far at least, shows the opposite. It comes off as dainty, even flimsy, as if inside this huge tower a little building were struggling to get out.