Menil Collection

The Menil Collection was designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano and completed in 1987 in Houston, Texas, built to house the art collection assembled by John and Dominique de Menil, who commissioned the museum and worked closely with Piano on its design in the years before its opening. Piano developed a distinctive roof system of curved ferro-cement leaves, cast concrete louvers set above a glass roof plane, engineered to diffuse and control natural daylight falling onto the galleries below while filtering out damaging ultraviolet light, a system that became one of the building's most studied features. The museum's low, gray-painted cypress-clad exterior deliberately echoes the modest wood-frame bungalows of the surrounding residential neighborhood, a scale and material choice intended to keep the museum from overwhelming its setting despite its considerable size. Interior galleries are organized as a simple, flexible sequence of naturally lit rooms rather than a monumental processional sequence, reflecting Dominique de Menil's stated preference for an intimate, unpretentious space for viewing art. The building has been widely influential on later museum design for its integration of daylight control directly into the building's structure.