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Working out of an office in Boston's financial district — inaccessible to the public and incapable of holding large public functions — the Boston Society of Architects (BSA) wanted a change of scene.

With more than $33 billion in its asset trust endowment, the Gates Foundation is the wealthiest charitable entity in the world. But it wanted to send the right message with the architecture of its new home: bold but not arrogant, global but also a good neighbor.

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.

The following excerpts are from a conversation included in Park Avenue Armory, a limited-edition publication edited by Gerhard Mack for the Park Avenue Armory Conservancy.

A single-story, 30,000-square-foot headquarters for the Livestrong Foundation, with office space, meeting rooms, a courtyard, a gym, and a resource center for cancer patients. Located in East Austin, the facility is an adaptive reuse of a concrete tilt-up paper warehouse built in the 1950s.

In an exhibition he organized at the New Museum in New York City last year, Rem Koolhaas took the preservation movement to task, arguing that it had become an “empire” all too successful at tying the hands of architects and suffocating daring thinking.