Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Closed for six years, the Harvard Art Museums reopen here Sunday after a radical overhaul by the architect Renzo Piano. He saved only the shell of the chaste, red-brick Fogg Museum and its interior courtyard, extending it upward in sheets of glass and elegant trusswork. Galleries wrap the new public space, but so do a materials lab, an art-conservation suite and a study center, where students, faculty and visitors can learn from the collection of 250,000 objects.

It’s an intricate puzzle piece, serving many agendas, the fruit of a tortured history and about $400 million. The renovation survived the economic crash, when Harvard stopped a billion-dollar lab complex that was to inaugurate a campus expansion in nearby Allston. “We were the only ones to come out of the tunnel,” said Thomas Lentz, the museums’ director, on a recent walk through the building.....Continue Reading

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