In the early 1990s, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum was suffering growing pains. Museum conservators warned that wear and tear from close to 200,000 visitors each year exposed the collection to damage. And modern visitor expectations caused many new essentials to be crammed into the Palace building—offices, classrooms, a café, a museum shop, and other public facilities.

Of necessity, conservation projects were underway, including replacing the skylight roof with thermal-pane glass and installing state-of-the-art climate control. At the same time, a new director, Anne Hawley, was showcasing experimental programs, inviting local students to engage with the Museum, and launching an Artist-in-Residence program. The question before the director and the trustees was how to bring Isabella’s legacy into the 21st century.

In 2002 an ambitious plan was presented. It called for cutting-edge programs—alongside a major historic preservation program. To allow the historic building to showcase the connection, and handle thousands of visitors a week, the plan called for a new building of 80,000 square feet. Like Isabella’s Museum, the new building was envisioned to be a work of art in its own right, and Renzo Piano, the Pritzker-Prize winning architect, was hired to design it.

When Renzo Piano did his first walk-through of the Gardner Museum, he took in the courtyard, the architecture, and the collection and said, “This lady was mad. I have to quit this job. No one can do it.” It was hyperbole. Four major design proposals later, $100 million was raised, plans were finalized, and construction began. Construction lasted two and a half years, and the New Wing opened in 2012.

One of the challenges of creating a New Wing was to both respect and complement Isabella’s vision. The new building needed to be close enough to the historic building to produce a tension, but not overshadow it. Renzo Piano said the new building must be a “respectful nephew to the great aunt.” Piano obsessed over the correct distance between the historic palace and the new wing, likening it to two people needing to be just the right distance from each other to have a conversation.

Piano’s design solution was to connect the two buildings with a spacious glass corridor through which visitors progress, through gardens, into the courtyard. In addition, he set the new building back from the old, and translated materials found in the historic building (red brick, bluestone pavement tiles, and copper cladding) into the new.

In 2016, four years after it opened, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s bold and contemporary addition was hailed as the year’s “most beautiful building” by the Boston Society of Architects, honoring it with the city’s Harleston Parker Medal, which has been awarded since 1921.