Six years ago, in a remarkable display of how far a determined architect can guide a client, Jennifer Luce decided that the Mingei International Museum, a San Diego institution that collects and displays folk art from around the world, needed a top-to-bottom renovation—and then persuaded its leaders to spend some $55 million on the project. The museum’s portion of a Spanish Colonial–style building in the city’s 1,200-acre Balboa Park had become “tattered,” Luce says, and “did not represent the Mingei’s values of craft, material, and detail.”