North light in the deep south: Renzo Piano's series of additions to Atlanta's High Museum sensitively revitalise a major arts institution.

How come--many American architects must ask--Renzo Piano is so goddamn successful? Fresh from the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas (AR June 2004) and the Morgan Library reconstruction in Manhattan (AR June 2006), Italy's greatest living architect currently has a roster of US projects that no other practice--not even Herzog & de Meuron--comes close to emulating. There's the New York Times tower, campus planning for Columbia and Princeton universities, and major museum projects in New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles. But first there is this family of interconnected pavilions for Atlanta's High Museum of Art.

The High first appeared on the architectural radar in 1983 with the unveiling of one of Richard Meier's most impressive achievements: an entirely new, pristine museum perched on its mound of lush Southern grass (AR February 1984). Piano's project is not merely to extend the Meier original; it is to create a museum village in which the 1983 building and the Woodruff Arts Center--a large performing arts complex that pre-dates the Meier intervention--are constituent structures. If the Meier museum, now known as the Stent Family Wing, is an object building embracing its ramped, introverted foyer, the new High works to frame a generous courtyard open to the elements and to public life.

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Whereas Meier's primary cladding unit is a square of white enamel, Piano clads his pavilions in vertical panels of aluminium with a matte, off-white finish that is almost soft grey in certain lights. Today, Meier's building reveals Post Modernist traits, collaging geometric elements or fragments (the original drawings appropriated human figures from Seurat). It has a stone base with punched square openings, a kind of ersatz heavy basement, whereas Piano's additions seem to float above grade. In fact these square and elongated modules are indicative of the difference between the somewhat static original and Piano's response--a kit of skin and bones that might be replicated ad infinitum.

Visitors can still enter the High up Meier's diagonal ramp from Peachtree Street, under a Cubist portico with a signature Piano curve pavilion to one side. Yet most visitors will most likely first enter the new courtyard, the Carroll Slater Sifly Piazza, directly from Peachtree to the east; from the extensive underground garage; or through narrow lanes from the south, west, and north. Piano's background architecture both frames the piazza and grafts onto the Woodruff Arts Center with a restaurant pavilion. Also included in the new ensemble is an administrative building and, about a piazzetta to the south-west, a hall of residence and sculpture building for the Atlanta College of Art.

In contemporary America's automobile society, Piano has employed figure/ground tactics, reminiscent of Nolli's eighteenth-century map of Rome, that give priority to external pedestrian space and are capable of integrating 'found' buildings. The new Piazza enjoys proportions similar to the Piazza San Matteo in Piano's native Genoa. From this outdoor room, visitors can enter new galleries in the Anne Cox Chambers Wing or the larger Wieland Pavilion that plugs into the Meier rotunda. The piazza level is recessed and glazed with views through the foyers and a sculpture terrace. Entry canopies and enclosed bridges exhibit Piano's characteristic light touch with steel and glass components.

Everything the visitor has seen thus far is elegant, if unadventurous. The interiors are where the Piano team excels and where the curators can install art with flexibility and in comfort. Exhibition galleries on the upper floor of the Wieland Pavilion are the piece-de-resistance. A grand, subdivisible volume of white walls and wall partitions is floored in strips of polished oak and roofed with coffers that run east/west and admit a subtle and modulated natural light into the calm interior. With interstitial tracks for supplementary lighting, the coffers are made of white-painted, glass-fibre-reinforced gypsum that swells upward into pockets of diffuse light. Intimate spaces are created along the westerly boundary as it slices at an angle to the orthogonal grid. Housing temporary exhibition galleries, the Cox Chambers Wing is topped by 200 light scoops; the Wieland has an astonishing 800. On the exterior, these scoops are partially visible as a serrated silhouette rising seamlessly from the vertical aluminium panels. They face north to admit only that preferred cool northern light. The uniform aluminium panels and glass make the exterior somewhat dully repetitive (must the restaurant pavilion reiterate the same palette?). Yet the quality of space and light make Piano's High a noble neighbour to the Meier building and another success in the Genoese architect's remarkable US adventure.

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