Renzo Piano never wanted to build a house. With a portfolio of museums, towers, and other award-winning buildings across the world, his mind was elsewhere. 

For the general public, the Kimbell Art Museum’s exalted reputation rests on the extraordinarily high quality of its small collection, with hundreds of firstrate pieces by Western painters and sculptors, and a growing cache of Asian and pre-Columbian work.

No matter where you are in London, the Shard stands out.

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.

Charged with adding expansive and flexible exhibition space to the museum's campus, the Renzo Piano team—who were responsible for the neighboring Broad Contemporary Art Museum, completed in 2008—designed an open-plan pavilion large enough to accommodate large-scale works or several separate exhibitions simultaneously.

Here we go again—another art museum, another building by Renzo Piano.