Crystal Palace: An enormous exclamation point on the London skyline, the Shard challenges the city's old notions of fitting in and offers a new approach to high-density growth.
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.
Renzo Piano Building Workshop bridges a historic structure and a grand public space with its trademark Classicism at The Art Institute of Chicago's Modern Wing.
To support the expansive roof, RPBW designed a set of four masonry structures—one at each corner—incorporating two of the original academy’s Neoclassical limestone walls in the northeast structure and using poured concrete for the others.
In the past few years, New York City has been valiantly trying to turn around its deserved reputation for treating innovative architecture like an exotic disease that should be stamped out by courageous developers, bankers, and government officials.