Photos by Jon Chase; photo 2 by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographers

Director of Facilities Planning and Management for the Harvard Art Museums Peter Atkinson examines the Harvard Art Museums’ new rooftop designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano (photo 1). The elegant glass and steel roof (photos 2, 3) diffuses sunlight into the building’s new central circulation corridor including various galleries and arcades, and onto the iconic Calderwood Courtyard.

In revamped Art Museums, architect Renzo Piano’s crystalline roof acts as a ‘glass lantern,’ brightening all below

From above, Harvard’s newest architectural wonder simply sparkles: a gleaming geometric rooftop poking above the trees.

The glass-and-steel crown, the calling card of Pritzker Prize-winning Italian architect Renzo Piano, caps the newly expanded and renovated Harvard Art Museums and is the building’s defining feature, both in flair and function. Referred to as the glass lantern, it knits together the existing façades of the 1927 Fogg Museum building with an expansive addition that includes the Busch-Reisinger and Sackler museums, and showers the Fogg’s iconic Calderwood Courtyard with natural light.

“Given the fact that Renzo uses light as a building material, I think in many ways he was a very obvious choice for us,” said Thomas W. Lentz, the Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard Art Museums.

And light is everywhere. Piano’s giant skylight disperses sunshine through the museums’ conservation lab, art study center, and the new central circulation corridor, diffusing brightness into the galleries and arcades and the beloved old courtyard, creating what Piano calls the “light machine.”....Continue Reading

> via HarvardGazette