Above and below are renderings of Renzo Piano’s fortcoming expansion of the Kimbell Art Museum in the Cultural District.  Piano’s new building will sit across from the Kimbell’s main entrance, on a portion of the current “Great Lawn.”  It will be of similar size and scale to the original Louis Kahn building, and defers to its predecessor in many ways – for example, Piano is attempting to correct the way people enter the complex, by orienting an entrance from a new underground garage to direct people into the space between the two buildings, facing the original Kimbell’s main entrance (most people seem to throw their car in one of the eastern lots and scurry in via the below-grade back door rather than making their entrance through Kahn’s beautiful main entrance on the west side).

About the best article on the new design we’ve found is this one from the New York Times, written by Nicolai Ouroussoff.  Here are some excerpts:

Mr. Piano invested a great deal of creative energy fine-tuning the relationship between his building and the old one, which will face each other across a shallow reflecting pool. Most visitors will arrive through a new parking garage buried underneath this pool and ride an elevator or take one of two broad staircases up to the front of the addition. In a nod of respect to Kahn, Mr. Piano has oriented both the stairs and the elevator to the east, so that as you emerge at ground level, your first view is of the vaulted arcades of the Kimbell’s main entry facade rather than of his own building. From there you turn back into the addition or proceed along a more drawn out and ceremonial route around the reflecting pool and into the original museum.

His respect for Kahn’s masterwork, in which one can feel Mr. Piano reworking Kahn’s ideas over and over in his head, is obvious in the interiors as well. Approaching from the new reflecting pool, visitors will be able to look straight through the glass walls of the addition’s lobby to a strip of garden running behind, and beyond that to the glass-walled, 295-seat auditorium — a visual sequence that offers a richly layered counterpoint to Kahn’s outdoor entry. Inside, the layout of the main galleries on either side of the lobby mirrors Kahn’s plan. And by partly burying the auditorium, library and secondary galleries in back, underneath a mound of grass, Mr. Piano keeps his building from dominating the site. Even the choice of material — ethereal glass as opposed to Kahn’s concrete and travertine — suggests deference, making the addition a ghostly twin of the original.

The scariest challenge of the project, surely, was trying to create a roof structure that could hold up against Kahn’s vaults. Mr. Piano too is celebrated as one of the great masters of light; the curved louvers of the Menil Collection have been studied as attentively by architects as the Kimbell’s roof structure. Here, working with the engineer Guy Nordenson, Mr. Piano creates a system of twinned wood beams supported on concrete pillars. A complex system of fabric scrims, glass panels and metal louvers rests on top of this frame, creating a highly refined light-regulating machine.