The Morgan Library and Museum reopens.(Current and coming)

The Morgan Library and Museum is one of the most impressive, yet intimate and rarefied museums in New York City, so some of its admirers were not enthusiastic when it announced its plan to expand and closed down more than three years ago. Happily, when the library reopened on April 29, it was clear that the enlargement has not affected the intimacy that visitors have always found so pleasing.

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Renzo Piano, the Paris- and Genoa-based architect of this $102 million project, has designed numerous museums and museum additions in this country and elsewhere, but this is his first completed project of any kind in New York City. No expansion that he designs is commonplace, but all of them are sensitive to the mandates of the commissioning institution. In the case of the Morgan Library, the result is quiet, elegant, and fresh.

Piano was given the formidable task of uniting the three architecturally disparate buildings that comprised the library--the original marble-clad structure of 1906 designed by Charles McKim of McKim, Mead and White; a nineteenth-century town-house; and the 1928 annex, designed by Benjamin Wistar Morris. Piano accomplished this by designing three glass and steel pavilions that face Thirty-sixth Street, Thirty-seventh Street, and Madison Avenue, where the entrance is now located. The smallest of the pavilions is a perfectly proportioned twenty-foot cube that houses the greatest rarities of medieval and early Renaissance decorative arts in the collection.

Some seventy-five thousand square feet of new space has been added, nearly doubling the size of the institution. Much of the addition is fifty feet below ground, and includes exhibition galleries; storage vaults; and visitor services, such as an auditorium, reading room, and cafes. The bookstore is located in what were lavish domestic spaces of Pierpont Morgan Jr.'s house. One room has elegantly carved architectural details and the other has gilded boiserie, making these among the most sumptuous retail spaces in New York City.

Most of the interior walls not devoted to galleries are faced with warm cherry wood, including the 280-seat auditorium and the reading room. The wood is juxtaposed with glass, which sets off the elevator shaft, ...