Archinect - News

Kimbell’s $135 Million Expansion Has Light, Needs Soul

2013-11-18T20:30:00-05:00

Designed by Louis Kahn in 1972, the Kimbell is considered the greatest American museum building of the 20th century. Understandably, the new $135-million addition by Renzo Piano, which at 101,000 square feet (9,383 square meters) just about doubles the Kimbell’s space, has been anticipated with trepidation.

Museums may be his most lasting legacy

2013-11-11T11:43:00-05:00

“It is amazing,” said Mr. Piano...“Looking back, I counted, and I said, ‘Is this true?’ ”

Ted Loos sat down with Renzo Piano to discuss his firm's design for an expansion to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, opening on Nov. 27. They also discussed the firms history of 25 major museum projects either underway or built, and how Piano has seemingly become the go to "starchitect" for museum commissions.

Kimbell Art Museum announces the Renzo Piano-designed pavilion will open on Nov. 27

2013-05-03T14:11:00-04:00

The highly anticipated expansion to the Kimbell Art Museum, designed by the Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW) and Kendall/Heaton Associates, opens to the public on Wednesday, November 27, 2013. Renzo Piano’s colonnaded pavilion stands as an expression of simplicity—glass, concrete and wood—surrounded by elms and red oaks, some 65 yards to the west of Louis I. Kahn’s vaulted, luminous museum of 1972.

Similar in scale to the Kahn building, the 300-foot-long, 22-foot-high building is composed of two parallel wings stretching from north to south, connected by two glass passageways. To the rear, the west wing will have a green sod roof, which appears to rise out of the ground with berms on either end and concrete retaining walls on the sides. The front, east wing is topped by a glass, steel and wood roof system. The wafer-thin top layer of this system, which features louvered photovoltaic cells, hovers above the east wing's most prominent feature: enormous laminated wood beams that appear to float above the concrete and glass walls and which are held aloft by square concrete columns.

The plan and elevation of the east wing, which faces the Kahn building, is tripartite, which mirrors the tripartite plan and elevation of the Kahn building. This is the most overt of the Piano building’s numerous echoes of its esteemed predecessor. The facade’s central, 100-foot-long recessed glas...