ILLUMINATED
The Menil Collection in Houston might be the most finely-executed building I’ve visited. Its designer Renzo Piano is now a starchitect, the go-to guy for museum projects internationally, but when he completed the Menil in 1986 he was relatively unknown, and the building glows with a beginner’s passion and, very literally, sunlight.
Its design succeeds at every basic level: landscaping,
circulation, scale, materiality, and detail. It’s an intimate structure, modeled after the
house that Philip Johnson designed for John and Dominique de Menil, and
where their art collection had been originally displayed. The one-story museum sits at the center of flat, grassy lot in a gracious residential neighborhood with manicured bungalows and century-old trees. It’s planned simply, with a string of galleries along one
long side, a string of support spaces along the other, and a tall
corridor along the spine. Outside, its horizontal wood siding is broken with slender steel columns. Inside, its high white walls are set off by dark wood floors. Some of its larger galleries are interrupted with small interior courtyards crammed with lush, jungle-like plantings.
The building’s signature elements are its long ceiling baffles, that curve gently in profile like razor clam shells, and that cover the hallways, galleries and exterior
walkways. They seem to scoop light
inside, giving each space a dreamy glow. The baffles are both complex and naive, mechanistic and natural. At first glance they seem heavy, as if they’ve been sculpted from plaster or bone, and then, at the next turn, immaterial, like tissue. On the afternoon I visited there were intermittent rains and, from one minute to the next, the rooms dimmed and brightened, until the clouds passed and they were bathed with sunshine. In drawings and photographs the baffles seem heavy-handed, calculated, as if Piano were more interested in angles (which he studied) and hardware (which he also studied) than light. But as installed at the museum the baffles are natural: entirely exposed and inconspicuous. Through their effects, the building achieves a state of grace.