Cooperative Architecture

Benjamin Forgey says that Renzo Piano’s expansion of Atlanta’s High Museum of Art is a resounding architectural success largely because Piano resisted the urge to make the project all about him. Instead, Piano’s expansion built methodically on what the High’s original architect, Richard Meier, had done, and the result was “the complex equivalent of a friendly handshake — not awfully exciting, but satisfying in myriad ways. A sensible, sensitive, low-key sort of triumph, then.”