
Renzo Piano’s Pontus Hultén Study Gallery
THE MACHINERY IS QUITE LOUD, and that is something that the architect Renzo Piano, its designer, likes. In fact, as he explained to me this past summer, standing in a gallery of Moderna Museet in Stockholm—where his contraption was making walls of artworks descend from the ceiling along metal tracks—he would not have minded it being even noisier. However cool his architecture, Piano has a taste for extravagant machines, something he shared with his longtime friend Pontus Hultén (1924–2006), at whose behest and in whose spirit this unique apparatus was created. In 2005, Hultén, head of the Moderna