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While Harvard’s campus boasts myriad architectural styles, very few buildings themselves exhibit multiple architectural styles as dramatically — and beautifully — as the Harvard Art Museums.

Nestled just off the center of campus and neighboring the Carpenter Center — Le Corbusier’s only North American building — the Harvard Art Museums elegantly combines both new and old.

From Harvard Yard, the museum looks like many other buildings on campus. It has a Georgian façade and a red-brick exterior. It’s stately. It’s quintessentially “Harvard.” However, should one approach the museum from Prescott Street, or even from the nearby 485 Broadway, one sees a very different structure.

With respect to Harvard’s long history, the Harvard Art Museums is a relatively new institution. In 1983, Harvard’s three distinct art museums — the Arthur M. Sackler, the Busch-Reisinger, and the Fogg — merged into one entity. In an extensive six-year renovation ending in 2014, the original Georgian-style site of the Fogg was transformed and expanded into a new home for the recently formed institution.

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The renovation was undertaken by the renowned architect and 1998 Pritzker Prize-winner Renzo Piano and his team at the Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW) alongside Payette, one of the leading architectural firms in Boston and a recipient of numerous American Institute of Architects (AIA) awards. Based in Genoa and Paris, RPBW is known for their steel-and-glass modernist designs, famously demonstrated by the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, The New York Times Building in New York, and the Kansai International Airport in Osaka, to name only a very few.

RPBW is not limited to modernist design, however. In fact, many of the firm’s projects demonstrate the careful attention they pay to each site’s history and surroundings. RPBW’s experience in historical preservation made the firm especially well-suited to the renovation of the Harvard Art Museums, which, as a historic structure, features a design that is protected by city, state, and federal architectural regulations. The brick façade original to the 1927 Fogg structure, for example, had to be preserved during the renovation.

Werner Otto Hall — the former location of the Busch-Reisinger Museum — was located directly behind the original Fogg Museum on Prescott Street. This building, which experienced various technical issues, was demolished during the renovation, allowing RPBW to add their own mark on the structure’s expansion.

So, while the preserved, historically protected portion of the museum mirrors the architecture of the Yard, a modern yet subtle, large yet unassuming, and unique yet not out-of-place structure makes up the museum’s expanded portion.

Notably, Piano’s expansion does not morph into the preserved structure but rather boldly announces its stylistic differences. The new addition is connected to the old brick building with a linear vertical glass partition, allowing visitors to clearly recognize the divide between the new and the old. Despite the museum’s distinct juxtaposition of two architectural styles, the structure is united by a glass pyramid that rests atop the two halves.

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In an interview with The Harvard Crimson, Elisabetta Trezzani, a Partner and Director at RPBW who worked with Piano to oversee the renovation of the Harvard Art Museums, said, “We don’t want to hide the fact that one [part] has a history, and another part, it’s new.”

While the contrast may seem quite striking from the museum’s exterior, the different architectural styles are merged in the interior in a seamless and cohesive manner — most impressively seen in the central Calderwood Courtyard, which is crowned by the glass pyramid.

The façade of the interior Calderwood Courtyard, made of imported Italian travertine, was one of the only elements of the original structure — alongside the exterior brick façade — preserved by the renovation. The courtyard’s interior elevation of stacked arcades takes inspiration from the exterior façade of a 16th-century canon’s house in Montepulciano.

In addition to preserving the original museum’s allusion to a faraway villa, RPBW took inspiration from design elements found a little closer to home.

For example, when studying how to incorporate natural light into the space, Trezzani explained, RPBW took inspiration from the pyramidal tops of streetlamps dotting the campus’ winding paths and brick sidewalks. This detail was translated into the pyramidal glass roof of the Harvard Art Museums itself, illuminating the gallery floors and the spacious central courtyard.

As she directed the renovation of the Harvard Art Museums, Trezzani also oversaw the renovation of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. While certain design elements are consistently prioritized by RPBW across all of their projects — like “transparency, connection, light, [and] lightness” — one has to consider how to incorporate the collection of art, the site, and the broader city into the project’s final form, Trezzani said.

“Every project is different, in a way, because you need to refer to the place and the connection to the place,” Trezzani said.

This devotion to place on part of RPBW is apparent even in the materials they used, as the Harvard Art Museums’ expanded section is composed of thin panels of now-faded wood: a subtle homage to the traditional use of clapboard in Boston and New England.

It is in these understated and subtle moments that the beauty of RPBW’s designs shines especially brightly. For example, as Trezzani explained, the pyramidal roof was designed to hide just out of sight as visitors approach from the Yard, honoring the original museum’s history in the visual experience of its preserved façade view.

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Even the porch of expanded section of the museum was subtly designed so that it connects to the Carpenter Center’s iconic S-shaped ramp — “[It] was a nice gesture towards Le Corbusier, in a way, to make a connection in a very minimal way to connect the two,” Trezzani said.

The museum’s convergence of architectural styles mirrors its role, which, post-renovation, is much more than a showcase of the university’s vast collection of art. Now, the Harvard Art Museums is home to conservation labs, art studies spaces, lecture halls, a museum shop and cafe, in addition to the galleries.

“Now, as a visitor, you’re able to go all the way up to the fifth floor, and you can see into our conservation labs. So, previously, those labs were behind closed doors — something visitors would never get to see, didn’t know much about. But, it’s one of the most important things that we do here. This conservation lab was the first established in the United States for the preservation and care of works of art — and it’s still a very cutting-edge part of our program,” said Daron Manoogian, the Director of Communications at the Harvard Art Museums.

By boosting visibility and emphasizing the courtyard as a welcoming, open space, RPBW helped balance the Harvard Art Museums’ roles as both a teaching and a public museum.

Sarah Ganz Blythe, the Director of the Harvard Art Museums, said, “It’s a lovely kind of nexus of an academic space and a public space.”

Contrary to what one may think today, the museum’s public emphasis is a relatively new development: “Historically speaking, this museum primarily only served Harvard students and faculty,” Manoogian said.

According to Manoogian, the museum had two main goals for the renovation: “One was to create one unified, expanded space for all of our collections to be together and to be presented together.”

The other was to figure out a way to make the museum more accessible to everyone, including the public.

“[Piano] used to refer to his reconception of this courtyard as creating a ‘piazza,’ which, in Italian culture, is a place where people gather; It’s a town square. It’s a place where people feel welcome to just linger, pass through, spend some time, socialize, and we’re enormously grateful that that’s what it’s become now,” Manoogian said.

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A “town square,” retrospectively, was just what Harvard’s campus needed. According to the Harvard Square Business Association’s website, over 8 million people visit the Square each year. Other than the Richard A. and Susan F. Smith Campus Center and the Science Center, which may feel more student-oriented, there are not many spaces on campus that prioritize public access as central to their mission.

Calderwood Courtyard serves as a “‘third space,’ where you don’t have to go to the galleries, you don’t have to be here for class, but you can come into the ‘town square.’ And so, around lunch or throughout the day, you see faculty with their office hours, but you also see families with strollers and people meeting up,” Ganz Blythe said.

Along with the museum’s 2023 decision to make admission free to the public, RPBW’s attentive reorganization of the space dramatically aided the museum in opening up the building to everyone.

In 2021, the Boston Society for Architecture (BSA) awarded the Harvard Art Museums the prestigious Harleston Parker Medal — reserved for “the most beautiful piece of architecture, building, monument, or structure within the City or Metropolitan Parks District limits,” according to the BSA’s website.

“It’s wonderful to think about all the ways that a building is built to perpetuate different ways of being, and then, a decade later, you can see, ‘Hey, did it work? What is it like?’ And so forth,” Ganz Blythe said.

It’s safe to say that it did work. From Georgian bricks and travertine columns to clapboard wood panels, the Harvard Art Museums has not only secured a seat in the pantheon of world-class art museums, but it serves as a bridge that connects Harvard to the world.

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—In his column “Building Harvard,” Thomas A. Ferro ’26 surveys a collection of notable structures that define the university’s campus. He can be reached at thomas.ferro@thecrimson.com.