Word: pianos
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After the Pompidou became a hit with tourists, Piano might have been expected to go on to a career-length succession of wild and crazy schemes. But lurking within him was a closet classicist. That became obvious in 1987 with the opening of his Menil Collection in Houston--another startling building, but this one startling in its simplicity. A subdued, low-rise museum, the Menil is a machine for delivering light, which it coaxes indoors in just the right amounts through an ingenious roof system of louvers...
What the Menil made clear was that light was going to be one of Piano's chief materials. His best buildings are elegant variations on the idea of transparency. His Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, just five adjacent bays with travertine walls, is one of the most gratifying art-exhibition spaces in the world. But not everything Piano touches turns out as nicely. In pre-construction models, his New York Times headquarters looked delicate almost to the point of evanescent--quite a trick for a Manhattan skyscraper. But in the execution, the ceramic rods Piano devised to screen the glass...
With the California Academy, a combination research institute, natural-history museum, planetarium and aquarium, Piano is back in stride. What he has produced is a fascinating hybrid of classicism and a romantic view of nature that stretches back to the 18th century. The original museum, a complex of 11 buildings constructed over decades in Golden Gate Park, was badly damaged by the earthquake that hit the Bay Area in 1989. While keeping some of the original Beaux Arts structure, Piano has wrapped it in a finely detailed package of glass and steel...
...creation of a rain forest. This globe in turn sits against a wide glass wall that looks onto the cultivated woodlands of Golden Gate Park, mingling views of rain forest and parkland until this very rational building seems just about overtaken by the natural world. "As in music," says Piano, "in architecture you always need a kind of precision, clarity, but with one condition--that you have the freedom then to destroy the whole thing...
What all this means is that the Academy doesn't contain the world of nature; it's penetrated by it. That's a good metaphor for the cooperative dealings with the environment that Piano wants his building to symbolize. He sees the project as a step toward developing what he calls "the aesthetics of sustainability," a new vocabulary of forms for a future in which green buildings will be the norm. "The 19th century was about new kinds of construction," he says. "Steel and so forth. And the 20th century created a language for that. Now architects must develop...