To mark the United States’ 250th anniversary, Architectural Record invited leading architects and educators to nominate the most significant works of American architecture. Among the contributors was Sarah M. Whiting, dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, who selected the Menil Collection (1982–87) in Houston, Texas, designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop with Richard Fitzgerald and engineer Peter Rice.
Whiting describes the museum as an enduring model of public-minded patronage and design, born of the collaboration between Dominique and John de Menil, the architects, and engineers.
“Our country’s civic and cultural institutions have forged our collective consciousness—perhaps not as a right, like the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness, but most certainly a need,” Whiting writes. “And never more so than now.”
Whiting praises the building’s innovative daylighting system—300 ferro-cement “leaves” suspended from a delicate white steel frame—which fulfills Dominique de Menil’s insistence that art be experienced in natural light. For Whiting, “The Menil Collection embodies and enables the pursuit of happiness for all.”