The Morgan Library & Museum

The addition to and renovation of the Pierpont Morgan Library, included the Morgan mansion, a 1928 Annex, and Charles McKim’s masterful library along with Renzo Piano’s contemporary insertion between those three landmarked buildings. These structures as well as the Morgan’s priceless collection had to be preserved and protected during a major construction intervention.

We established a program and a budget after concept design was complete, but Renzo Piano Building Workshop, to their credit, reacted positively to both and modified their initial designs to meet both requirements. We established a budget of $102 million in early 2001.

We excavated 60 feet below street level in solid Manhattan schist, within inches of the historic foundations, and inserted Piano’s delicate latticework of steel and glass. But for all the complicated design and construction, the most difficult and critical task to make the project happen was to insure the safe moving of the priceless collection and their guardians onsite and offsite. With the able guidance and commitment of the museum’s director Robert Parks, we were able to convince reluctant curators to cooperate. We moved 350,000 objects and 30 curators to a temporary venue. Without that crucial success early on, the project could have been delayed or derailed.

We opened in 2006 and met the 2001 budget within .02%.

Architect:  Renzo Piano Building Workshop

Location:  New York, NY

Gross Square Footage:  130,000

Completion Date:  2006

www.themorgan.org

News
The Consultant Behind the Guggenheim Bilbao on What Makes Good Architecture
The Consultant Behind the Guggenheim Bilbao on What Makes Good Architecture

By Paul Clemence

Andy Klemmer has had a front-seat view of the making of some of the most important pieces of architecture of our time. The president and founder of the consulting firm Paratus Group, Klemmer was an essential part of the team that helped develop the iconic Guggenheim Bilbao. Since then, he’s gone on to consult on the California Academy of Science, the Perez Art Museum Miami, the Kimbell Art Museum expansion, working with architects like Renzo Piano, Herzog & de Meuron, and SANAA.

Inner Beauty: Renzo Piano’s Morgan Library looks blah from the street—but it may be the city’s only walk-in reliquary.
Inner Beauty: Renzo Piano’s Morgan Library looks blah from the street—but it may be the city’s only walk-in reliquary.

By Mark Stevens

From the outside, Piano’s design is undistinguished; the exterior rosy-white grid through which visitors will enter looks dull and vacant when compared with the richly nuanced brown and gray stones of the earlier buildings on either side. But his glassy interior, at once intimate and expansive, is marvelously scaled—just right for examining small things of great value. An ideal setting for the Morgan’s jewels.

Renzo Piano's Expansion of the Morgan Library Transforms a World of Robber Barons and Scholars
Renzo Piano's Expansion of the Morgan Library Transforms a World of Robber Barons and Scholars

By Nicolai Ouroussoff

His dazzling expansion of the Morgan Library and Museum collection, which opens to the public on April 29, may either stoke that envy or forever put it to rest. A sublime expression of the architect's preoccupation with light, the design transforms the world of robber barons and dust-coated scholars conjured by the old Morgan into a taut architectural composition bursting with civic hope.

Molto Piano
Molto Piano

By Paul Goldberger

Piano’s achievement at the Morgan is to have created a satisfying composition out of three not particularly compatible landmark structures.