Once you get past the eye-popping turquoise green prepatinated copper of Renzo Piano's new 70,000-square-foot addition to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, you discover that the new wing echoes the older museum in its proportions, sleek lines, and taut planes. Piano's glass, brick (and copper) cladding for the $114 million steel-frame and poured-concrete structure retains, too, the austerity of the beige brick pile designed in 1903 by architect Willard T. Sears facing the Fenway. While Sears's palazzo for his indomitable dowager-client shows an affinity to 15th century Venetian predecessors, its brick expanses and small, plainly rendered windows evoke as easily early Modernist industrial buildings such as Hans Poelzig's Chemical Factory in Luban, Poland (1912). The factory motif shows up in Piano's scheme as well'not surprising for a Modernist vocabulary.
But now we must return to the copper'the elephant in the backyard. Although naturally patinated copper appears in traditional structures nearby, Piano's decision to prepatinate an expansive skin was dead wrong. The corrugated green screen lacks the subtlety, depth, and faded tone of naturally oxidized copper. And there is so much prepatinated green copper (even if a number of panels bear a yellowish tinge) that it appears flat and homogenous, especially on gray days. In an informal conversation last October, Piano defended the copper covering's 'fragility and lightness.' But he then mused that the prepatination 'does need a little help.' The other major exterior material, a fire-engine-red brick, at least approximates the color of surrounding brick buildings and echoes the smooth texture and scale of the horizontal, almost Roman-size brick, with tightly mortared joints, of the Gardner's beige walls. In addition, Piano's glass-sided fire escapes and balconies do bounce light and articulate the new flat facades.
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