By DAVID DILLON / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
Texas can't seem to get enough of Renzo Piano, or he of it.
On Thursday, the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth announced that it had chosen Mr. Piano to design its new addition, making this his fourth museum in the state after the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and the Menil Collection and Cy Twombly Gallery in Houston. The addition will be a separate building across Arch Adams Street from Louis Kahn's 1974 masterpiece and will be used primarily for temporary exhibitions.
"When you have to take down your permanent collection for a special exhibition, you've got a big problem," Kimbell director Timothy Potts said Thursday. "And we often have to do it for half a year."
Discussions about an addition began internally last year and culminated in a March 21 agreement in Genoa, Italy, where Mr. Piano is based.
"No architect could refuse such a commission," said Mr. Piano, who had worked in Louis Kahn's Philadelphia office in the 1960s. "It is an awesome challenge, but an attractive one, to join hands over time with the master architect who created the Kimbell."
This is the museum's second run at an addition. The first, in 1989, generated such a firestorm of protest from critics, architects and the Kahn family that it had to be scrapped. The principal objections were that Romaldo Giurgola's design was a fat-fingered extension of a masterpiece, like adding on to the Parthenon or St. Peter's, for which there was no programmatic justification. With a permanent collection of fewer than 350 pieces, the Kimbell was hardly bursting at the seams.
The new addition would avoid the first problem by being physically separate from the original building, though probably connected to it by a tunnel. It will have its own architectural identity and its own program.
"We will finally have enough total space for both special exhibitions and the permanent collection," said Mr. Potts, "which isn't to say that one will always be in the addition and the other in the main building. It won't be a straitjacket."
There was no formal search, Mr. Potts said, just a strong feeling among board members that Mr. Piano was the best choice. "The fact that he had already designed three superb museums in Texas had a lot to do with it."
The cost, size and timing of his fourth are unknown at this point.
David Dillon is an architecture writer in Amherst, Mass.