Museum and research hub Menil Drawing institute

By Michael Webb - 29 October 2018

Deep in the heart of Houston - an intimidatingly huge, brash metropolis - is the Menil Collection, a 12-hectare campus dedicated to the contemplation and study of art. In a city where everyone drives, it is a place where you can abandon your car and stroll. Dominique de Menil, wife of John de Menil, both two philanthropic connoisseurs, commissioned Renzo Piano to create a museum to house their eclectic collection, which ranges from Cycladic figurines to Surrealist paintings and much else. The skylit block opened in 1987 and is still acclaimed as one of Piano’s finest works. To the south and east, galleries devoted to the work of Cy Twombly, Dan Flavin, and Byzantine frescoes, plus the earlier Rothko chapel, rise from lawns shaded by live oaks. They have been joined by a new masterwork: the Menil Drawing Institute (MDI), designed by the Los Angeles firm of Johnston Marklee to house a fast-growing collection of works on paper. A five-meter-high complex of galleries, study and conservation areas is designed to be viewed from all four sides, and is scaled to the modest dimensions of most drawings. Understated and enigmatic, it mediates between the lofty museum and the bungalows that surround the campus, the small cube of the Cy Twombly Gallery and the gray block of a new energy plant. Piano likened the Twombly to a butterfly hovering over a rock, and the MDI has a similar combination of lightness and rootedness. Walls and a projecting roof of white-lacquered steel plates about 1 cm thick contrast with broad planks of rough-hewn cedar, stained dark grey. Entry is from two corner courtyards, where white oaks add their shade to a roof that is folded like origami. New landscaping by Michael Van Valkenburgh frames the building. When the partnership of Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee won the MDI competition in 2012, they had created several distinctive houses and other low-key exercises in geometrical abstraction. Cubes were stacked, rotated, or carved away to achieve...