Grand Piano

ARCHITECTURE

A home for Houston's Menil Collection

Architect Renzo Piano is equally at home professionally in the rocky seaport of his native Genoa and the flat wasteland of Houston, where his latest (and first American) project, the Menil Collection, was just unveiled. In a playful mating of Mies, the Shed Style, and Nautical High Tech, Piano takes care to respect the texture and low-rise scale of the museum's residential neighborhood. The exposedsteel-frame oneand two-story structure is clad in gray heart cypress, with a system of triangulated roof trusses to serve as so many hangars supporting a sea of about-to-break whitewater waves—in ferroconcrete. Along each wave's aerodynamically curved surface the Houston sunlight is captured and then seduced into surrendering its intensity, falling gently onto the galleries within.

Pipe-dreamer Renzo Piano.

The soft-spoken, fifty-yearold Piano is a man apart from the current breed of architect/ promoters. Though forever identified with the Centre Pompidou in Paris (currently celebrating its tenth anniversary),

Piano has been practicing similarly breathtaking feats of engineering sleight of hand ever since, always to serve his first love, the environment. Characteristic of his projects A.B. (after Beaubourg) is the new Schlumberger industrial facility outside Paris, an exploit the happy wrapper Christo might well

envy: a meringue-like Teflon membrane strung on cables completes a sweeping landscape over and between two mounds of offices sous ter re.

Piano's Menil marks his arrival on our shores—a debut for which we should be grateful. Menil Collection. Houston.

SUSAN WOLDENBERG