Andrea Palladio, Design for the Villa Repeta at Campaglia (c. 1560s), RIBA British Architechtural Library

Visiting the Morgan Library since its 2006 reinvention as the “Morgan Library and Museum” has not been, for many of us, a particularly life-enhancing experience. The added “museum” function, grafted onto the Morgan’s continuing role as a unique repository for the literary, musical, and graphic arts, is only one of the problems with this new incarnation. Another is the attempt to weld into a coherent whole the institution’s disparate buildings, born in different periods and for different purposes. The task had been attempted before, albeit somewhat timidly, in the 1980s, but the recent restructuring, on designs by Renzo Piano, was far more radical, with results that have been widely and justly deplored.

The Morgan’s loudly declared public “museum” posture is immediately apparent as one approaches the new Madison Avenue entrance with its expansive sidewalk esplanade, outsized gray-metal signage, and low horizontal row of glass doorways. These bid a banal, vaguely 1960s welcome to a humdrum foyer, indistinguishable from similarly paneled anonymous spaces that abound in corporate headquarters and commercial high-rises further up the avenue. Then comes the pezzo forte:a soaring multilevel space complete with glass elevators that might well have been borrowed from a suburban mall or an Apple store. They are (perhaps) the unintended focus of this huge, sorry, and essentially useless aggregate of cubic feet, the predictable atrium. In