Harvard’s Fogg Museum, a Colonial Revival building at 32 Quincy Street, reopened five years ago after Renzo Piano’s major expansion, or “reboot” as The Guardian called it. The other day I had a free hour and I spent it in the Calderwood Courtyard of the old/new building. The architect of the original museum, Charles Coolidge of Coolidge, Shepley, Bulfinch and Abbot (H.H. Richardson’s successor firm), modeled the cloister-like arcades on the loggia of a sixteenth-century canon’s house in Montepulciano, designed by Antonio da Sangallo the Elder. Admittedly, the modeling is very loose, more like a stylized memory, and has a kind of American crispness in execution that is very different from the original. Piano added two stories on top of the arcade making a sort of spumoni—modern above, Renaissance below. The modernist layer is thin fare; Piano’s work, with its fussy greenhouse roof, looks provisional, like a temporary addition. I came to the conclusion that there were three chief reasons. 1) Steel and glass are simply not as engaging as travertine. 2) The orders of the arcades play with scale; the anonymous minimalist addition is more like utilitarian engineering—nothing but the facts ma’am. 3) The modeled arcades are defined by sharp shadows;

The organizers of the  competition to design a replacement spire for Notre Dame Cathedral, “even more beautiful than before” in President Macron’s words, might take a lesson from an incident that happened more than 300 years ago. In 1681 the architect Christopher Wren was commissioned to build a  bell tower for the quadrangle of Christ Church College in Oxford. The original tower had never been completed. The college had been founded by Cardinal Wolsey 150 years earlier, and had been built  in the  castellated Late Gothic style that was then popular but which was now long out of fashion. Wren was the country’s leading classicist. What did he do?  As he succinctly explained, the tower “ought to be Gothick to agree with the Founder’s worke.” Enough said.