Word: lightness
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Like a lot of architects, Piano grimaces when people ask him about his style. "I hate the idea," he says. "It's a dangerous thing, a rubber stamp you put on the world." What he believes in, he says, "is the value of transparency and light. This is not a style. This is just an attitude...
...Piano's buildings are filled with light - a delicate issue for museums, which have to protect paintings from direct sun but crave the atmosphere that only natural daylight can provide. In the mid-1980s he developed an ingenious louvered roof to filter powdery sunlight into the Menil Collection in Houston. Ever since, every museum that's hired him has been looking for its own version of the Piano roof...
...that shelters the Modern Wing starts with a broad flat canopy of aluminum blades. Those are angled to obstruct southern light while admitting gentler northern light, then deliver it to the third-floor galleries through translucent fabric screens. From outside, it also tops off the building's silhouette with a final flourish: a thin wafer of aluminum afloat on slender steel trusses. Piano likes to call it the "flying carpet...
Piano has placed floor-to-ceiling glass walls at the north and south ends of his building, which introduce light directly into some of the galleries through a scrim that can be raised on overcast days. The window walls also admit some powerful views of Millennium Park, including a huge vista of the billowing steel panels of Frank Gehry's wonderful Pritzker band shell, which comes at you like a breaker on the beach at Santa Monica...
Meanwhile, London is playing host to a Sondheim at the Garrick Theatre in the West End, where director Trevor Nunn is teasing out the nuances in A Little Night Music, Sondheim's 1973 adaptation of the Ingmar Bergman film Smiles of a Summer Night. Often performed as a light soufflé of a show, Nunn has turned the musical, which runs until July 25, into a Chekhovian meditation on desire and death. (See pictures of London...